The Deception of the Emerald Ring pc-3

by Лорен Уиллиг

  Wickham frowned. "See that this small annoyance doesn't detain you too long."

  "Oh, it won't," said Geoff blandly, drawing on his gloves. "You can be sure of that."

  Wickham lowered the Black Tulip's seal to the desk with a fatalistic thump. "Lord Pinchingdale, the one thing I have learned is that it is best never to be sure of anything."

  Given last night's events, Geoff was inclined to agree. Until midnight last night, he had been quite sure that the dawn would see him married to Mary Alsworthy. Instead…instead he found himself making hurried—and unwanted—preparations to marry her scheming sister.

  Replacing his hat, Geoff took his leave of Wickham. He had one last, unpleasant errand to undertake before he could seek out his study and a bottle of brandy, not necessarily in that order.

  Sleep would have been an impossibility the night before, even if there had been any night left to sleep in. Instead, upon departing the Alsworthys', Geoff had gone straight to his study. Stacking his working papers to one side, he had pulled out a blank piece of paper and dipped his quill in the ink pot. And got no further. The sound of ink dripping from his pen joined the steady tick of the clock on the mantel.

  Crumpling up the first sheet, Geoff had tried again. That time, he got so far as "My very dearest Mary" before the ink splotches took over the page. What, after all, could one say? I may be marrying your sister, but I will love you always? That page joined the others on the floor. It would be the worst sort of selfishness to attempt to bind Mary to him with declarations of affection when he had nothing more to offer her. Better by far, resolved Geoff, attacking a fourth page with enough force to crack the nib, for her to go on with her life, and find someone who would be free to offer her the things he could not: a home and a name.

  But he couldn't force his pen to shape the words that would free them both.

  Geoff stared around the well-worn room, the familiar books on the shelves, the bust of Cicero on its stand in the corner, the decanter on the table by the window. Outside the study door, the empty rooms pressed down upon him, like a vision of his future. No Mary to sweep in sunshine with her, no children waking the echoes with their laughter. Instead, nothing but more sleepless nights in his study, poring over dispatches from France.

  And when the war with France was over—as one assumed it must eventually be—what then? A squirrelly half-life of gaming hells and kept women? A place on the fringes of his friends' families? Neither was an attractive prospect.

  He supposed he would have to come to some sort of amicable arrangement with his unwanted bride, if only to prevent his cousin Jasper from inheriting. In books, people might die of balked desire, or live celibate lives mourning the loss of their own true love, but Geoff had estates to administer and responsibilities to fulfill, among which was included the production of an heir.

  Prior to Mary, he had never expected a love match. He hadn't expected thunder or violins or any of those other overblown sentiments that filled the covers of romantic novels and spilled over into reams of limping verse. He had always thought that someday, in the fullness of time, he would marry a nice, sensible sort of girl, the sort who could be trusted to oversee the house, speak articulately at the dinner table, and bear healthy and reasonably intelligent children. In fact, before Mary had invaded his dreams, his vision of his future wife had been someone not unlike Letty Alsworthy.

  Or, he corrected himself darkly, as he climbed the steps of a narrow-fronted house on Brewer Street, what he had supposed Letty Alsworthy to be. His cousin Jasper's lodgings were on the third floor, enough of a climb to discourage Jasper's more faint-hearted creditors, as well as his adoring mother. Geoffrey rapped on the door with the head of his cane.

  A brusque "Enter!" sounded from within. Jasper's man of all work was seldom present when there was any work to be done, and Jasper preferred not to lower himself to such menial tasks as opening doors.

  Turning the knob with a smart click, Geoff let himself in, removing his hat as he ducked through the low lintel of the door.

  Several versions of last night's story, ink smeared from hasty printing, mingled with the other debris on the floor around his cousin's chair, the one on top bearing the legend VARIETY-LOVING VISCOUNT SWITCHES SISTERS! SEE FULL STORY ON PAGE 2.

  Jasper indicated the paper with a swipe of the foot. "You can't really mean to go through with this?"

  Although it was already evening, Jasper looked as though he had just climbed out of bed. He lounged in an easy chair in his bachelor lodgings, with a dressing gown of heavy brocade negligently tied around his waist, an empty carafe and three stained glasses on a small table next to him bearing testament to last night's activities. A captain in the Horse Guards, Jasper never walked when he could swagger, never smiled when he could leer, and had the art of mentally undressing a lady down to the flick of an eyelash. He and Geoff had cordially hated each other since the time they were old enough to be put in a room together and told to play nicely.

  It had seemed oddly appropriate to ask his most reviled—if closest—relative to stand best man to him at a wedding that looked to contain about as much genuine affection as a harlot's kiss.

  When Geoff didn't answer immediately, a wide grin spread across Jasper's broad-boned face. He slapped his knee. "You are, aren't you! Devil take it, you're actually going to marry the scheming chit. I say, that is rich. I haven't been so entertained this fortnight."

  Geoff paced to the pier glass at the other side of the room, kicking an empty bottle out of the way as he went. "I don't see that I have a choice," he said tersely. He regarded the long trail of dust adhering to his otherwise impeccable Hessians with distaste. "Good God, Jasper, does your man ever clean? Or do you just keep him around to ward off your creditors?"

  His cousin ignored the slur on his housekeeping and leaned forward avidly. "I've been hearing the most fascinating stories all afternoon. Do tell, is it true that you were discovered in an inn with the little Alsworthy, both of you lacking certain crucial articles of clothing?"

  "No," said Geoff curtly.

  After all, they hadn't been in the inn, merely in front of it. And he couldn't vouch for her, but all his clothes had been firmly attached at all times.

  "Pity. I knew it was too much to hope that our virtuous Geoffrey had been chivied naked out of bed. But it makes such a delightful on dit, doesn't it? You've quite replaced Prinny in the gossip mills today."

  Jasper kicked his slippered feet up on a threadbare footstool. In contrast to the faded furniture, the slippers, like the robe, were of heavy crimson silk embroidered in gold thread. Jasper, as Geoff knew, had a convenient habit of switching tailors whenever his account came due. He changed lodgings with equal alacrity.

  "Deuced unlucky, that's what I call it," Jasper drawled. "It's a sad, sad day when a man can't dally with one sister without getting hauled off to the altar with the other."

  "I doubt that it's a universal predicament." Geoff paused in his perambulations to fix his cousin with a forbidding stare. "And I wasn't 'dallying' with Mary Alsworthy, as you so eloquently put it. I intended to marry her."

  "More fool you. Marry…Mary…Unmarried Mary…" Jasper waved his pipe languidly through the air. "There's a pun in that, if only I had the wit for it. Ah, well. You know what they say. The wine is in and the wit is out."

  "More wine than wit from the look of it," commented Geoff dryly, casting a pointed glance at the drained decanter by Jasper's elbow.

  "Not all of us can afford genuine, smuggled French brandy," retorted Jasper. "But I miss my manners. Care for a drink, coz?"

  "Not with you."

  "Off to moon over your dear lost Mary? Don't look so, coz! One sister will do as well as the other in the dark."

  "I'll ascribe that statement to the wine, and leave it at that."

  "Or you'd what? Call me out?" Jasper blew out a thick ring of smoke, and ran it through with the stem of his pipe. "Think how it would upset your dear mama. But our family paragon wouldn't do
anything so foolish, would he? Unless…I have always wondered, how far can our virtuous Geoffrey be pushed before he cracks?"

  "Push too far and I'll refuse to pay your bills the next time your creditors get too much for you," amended Geoff calmly. "Think how much that would upset your dear mama."

  His cousin regarded him coldly. "You do know how to make a man regret his parentage."

  "The sentiment is mutual. Do you know, Jasper," remarked Geoff, "I do believe you grow more loathsome every time I see you."

  "I aim to please, dear coz."

  The two men bared their teeth at each other in complete understanding and mutual loathing.

  "You'll stand up with me tomorrow?"

  Jasper stretched his long legs out in front of him. "Delighted to. I've always wanted to preside at an execution. Yours, for choice."

  "Don't forget your black cap."

  "I say, old chap," Jasper called after Geoff. "If this sister were to snuff it, you couldn't marry the other one, could you? Shades of Henry VIII and all that. Deuced hard luck for you."

  Geoff left Jasper's lodgings to the sound of his cousin's mocking laughter. Jasper, he thought grimly, had really missed his calling when he went into the army rather than take up his well-deserved place on the boards of Drury Lane. Geoff decidedly regretted the impulse that had driven him to Jasper's lodgings.

  It had clearly been a mistake to assume the day couldn't get any worse.

  Chapter Six

  The groom declined to carry the bride over the threshold.

  He could not, however, refuse to offer his arm, not with three hundred wedding guests thronging around them, eagerly awaiting any further tidbit of gossip that might be gleaned from the occasion. To her credit, she didn't grab or cling. She didn't need to. The deed was done. The fatal words had been said. One "I do" apiece, to be precise. As they moved through the crowded rooms of Pinchingdale House toward the ballroom, where the wedding breakfast had been laid out with enough lobster patties to satisfy even the Prince of Wales, Geoff felt the light touch of Letty's fingers burning through his sleeve like a brand.

  Mary hadn't attended the wedding. She had been unexpectedly called away to minister to a sick relative, although Geoff suspected it was more an exercise in tact than charity. The identity of the relative had already changed several times in the telling.

  Next to him, Letty's hair whispered against the stiff lace ruffle that framed the back of her collar. From the corner of his eye, he caught a quick, frowning glance of the sort she had been sending him all morning. Geoff pretended he hadn't seen.

  He would have liked to pretend her away altogether, but she was too corporeal to ignore. The faintly flowery fragrance of her hair mingled with the warm smell of clean skin taunted his nostrils with memory, and the plump shoulders revealed by the cut of her dress were already pink from the heat of the crowded room. A freckle perched right on the edge of her collarbone. The French, who, in the lazy days of the ancien rйgime had tended to name such things, would probably have given it a silly sort of name, like a "tatez-y," or a "touch here." It beckoned the eye as effectively as a well-fluttered fan.

  As to where the eye was drawn…Given the standards of the Season, her bodice was modest, even prim, but from the angle at which Geoff was looking, it did little to conceal the lush expanse of flesh so faithfully outlined in the carriage two nights before. The same night she had so effectively laid her trap.

  Geoff abruptly relocated his gaze. No matter how charmingly her freckles beckoned, it didn't change the fact that she was a scheming little opportunist who had ruined her own sister's happiness in her pursuit of social advancement. Whatever her allure, he despised her for her perfidy. And himself for his.

  The object of his unpleasant meditations tugged lightly on his sleeve. Geoff allotted her the most perfunctory of glances. "Yes, my sweet?"

  Letty frowned up at him with eyes as wide and blue as the summer sky and as treacherous as the sea.

  "Could we please go someplace private?" she whispered.

  Geoff smiled and nodded as someone he had never met before proffered insincere good wishes. "Eager to make sure we can't annul?" he asked pleasantly.

  It took a moment for the meaning of his words to sink in, and when they did, Letty colored right up to her eyebrows. Her fingers tightened on his arm. "To talk."

  "We have plenty of time for that." Deftly extracting his arm, Geoff brushed the back of Letty's hand with the merest pretense of a kiss. Pretense it might have been, but it still made Letty uncomfortably warm in a way that had nothing to do with the crush of people in the room. Over her knuckles, his gray eyes bored into hers. "Till death do us part, in fact. So if you will excuse me…"

  His departure was so neatly done that Letty hardly saw it happen. One moment, his fingers had tightened on hers to the point of pain; the next, he was gone, leaving her standing alone at her own wedding reception in a breach of etiquette the size of Scotland.

  Clearly, he was not in the mood to talk.

  Snagging a glass of champagne off a tray, Letty tilted it recklessly back, coughing as the bubbles seared the back of her throat. Liquid overflowed her glass and splashed onto the hem of her hastily refurbished best dress as someone jostled into her from behind.

  "All right there, my girl?"

  With a glass of negus in his hand, his white hair rumpled and his glasses askew on his nose, her father looked to be enjoying himself immensely. Letty had never been quite so delighted to see one of her parents.

  "It depends on what you mean by 'all right.'" Letty paused for a moment to consider. Her reputation was in tatters, she was irrevocably married to a man who was assiduously avoiding her, and she had just spilled champagne all over the hem of her best gown. "Actually, no."

  "Good, good." Mr. Alsworthy patted her absently on the shoulder. "A splendid illustration of the human comedy, isn't it, my little Letty?"

  "More farce than comedy," said Letty, taking refuge in another sip of champagne. Any drama of seduction and discovery that featured her in a leading role had to be farce. All that was needed was a jealous older husband and a comic serving wench hiding in a wardrobe.

  "We have all the seven sins displayed before us in fine array," Mr. Alsworthy continued cheerfully, as though Letty hadn't spoken. He waved a hand at the groups of chattering people, the dripping champagne, and the young fop who had collapsed in a corner of the room and was being discreetly hauled by his feet through the double doors by a pair of liveried footmen. "Gluttony, sloth, vainglory, even a spot of lust."

  "I think you missed a few," said Letty. "That was only four."

  "I did miss out envy, didn't I? Your mother is quite outdone. I saw at least three ensembles sillier than hers in the music room alone." Mr. Alsworthy rubbed his thin hands together in contemplation of it.

  As always, Letty marveled at her father's ability to be so easily diverted. Why couldn't she do that? Her predicament would be far easier if she could step back and view the chattering wedding guests from the lofty height of condescension, scorning their petty gossip and pitying their small-mindedness.

  Of course, her father wasn't the one being invited by elderly rouйs to participate in the reproduction of salacious French prints.

  "I would find it all more amusing if I weren't the object of it," said Letty bluntly.

  Mr. Alsworthy patted her reassuringly on the arm. "Buck up, my girl. There will be a new scandal next week, and you will be all but forgotten."

  "But I will still be married," pointed out Letty, lifting her glass again to her lips. The bubbles didn't hurt quite so much, and the sour liquid was beginning to spread a comforting warmth from her cheekbones straight back to her ears.

  "Alas, so go we all eventually. It is an unenviable but inevitable part of the human condition." Mr. Alsworthy's eyes lit upon a portly gentleman who was dipping his cup directly into the punch. "Ah, that's where Marchmain got to! His recent letter in the Thinking Man's Monthly on the implications of that man
Smith's theories was entirely misguided."

  "Was it?" muttered Letty.

  She should have known better than to seek reassurance from her father. After all, this was the man whose idea of comforting a child afraid of the dark was to explain Plato's allegory of shadows on the wall of the cave. As a strategy, it had worked better than one might have expected. The story had put her straight to sleep, mooting the entire question of monsters in the closet.

  Unfortunately, she didn't think a misconceived marriage could be similarly bored away with an explanation of the wealth of nations, not unless she slept for a very long time, indeed.

  Some of the strain in Letty's tone must have penetrated her father's philosophical fervor. Mr. Alsworthy paused a moment in his pursuit of greater truths to comfort his daughter in her time of need.

  "In navigating the shoals of matrimony, my best advice to you, my dear," he said briskly, "is to invest in a subscription to the circulating library and a stout pair of earplugs."

  "Your very best advice is earplugs?"

  "Yes, earplugs. I favor wax, although a bit of wadded cloth will do, as well." His duty discharged, Mr. Alsworthy beamed at his daughter, set his spectacles more firmly on the bridge of his nose, and said, "Pardon me, my dear. I'm off to set Marchmain straight. The man doesn't know the first thing about the principles of political economy."

  With a gleam in his eye not unknown to Roman Caesars and the more bloodthirsty sort of pugilist, Mr. Alsworthy set off for the punchbowl and his prey, leaving his daughter prey to another sort of emotion entirely.

  Earplugs. Letty shook her head, a crooked little smile curving her frozen lips. She didn't think they would do very much good in her situation.

  Taking a fresh glass from a footman's tray, Letty scanned the crowd for her errant husband. He was standing with one arm braced against the plinth of a statue of Daphne, deep in conversation with Miles Dorrington and his wife, Lady Henrietta. As Letty looked on, he arched an eyebrow and said something to Lady Henrietta that caused her to swat him with her fan, and Dorrington to fold his arms across his chest in a gesture of mock menace. Lord Pinchingdale's lips curved fondly, and he shook his head at Lady Henrietta's retaliatory rejoinder. Watching them, Letty wanted, painfully, to be part of that charmed circle of easy camaraderie. She wanted Lord Pinchingdale to bend his head attentively toward her, as he was toward Lady Henrietta, to lift a dark eyebrow at her, with a hint of a smile lurking about his lips to take the sting from the gesture.