The Last Hellion

by Loretta Chase

  “Be careful, Lyddy.”

  “Yes, yes.” Lydia turned and threw her a cocky grin. “Deuce take it, wench. Must you be forever pesterin’ and plaguin’ a fellow?”

  Then she swaggered out, Helena’s uneasy laughter trailing behind her.

  This Wednesday night, the publishing hacks’ gathering at the Blue Owl was a dull affair, for Grenville of the Argus was absent.

  Joe Purvis was there, though, and returning from the privy when Vere met up with him in the hall.

  It should have taken more than one glass of gin to loosen Joe’s tongue regarding his co-worker’s whereabouts. But the Argus’s illustrator was already the worse for drink, which exacerbated his sense of injury.

  In the first place, he complained to Vere, the fellows had taken to calling him “Squeaky” ever since last week, when Grenville had pretended to mistake his voice for a mouse’s. In the second, she’d as usual managed to hog a plum assignment all to herself.

  “I should be at Jerrimer’s with her,” Joe grumbled, “seeing as it’s to be the lead story next issue and wants a cover picture. But Her Majesty says there isn’t a gambling hell in London doesn’t know my face and I’ll give the game away. Like anyone was likely to overlook a Long Meg like her in a poky little hole like that.”

  Small as Jerrimer’s turned out to be, Vere very nearly did overlook her.

  It was the cigar that caught his attention.

  Otherwise, he would have walked by the young man with little more than a glance, noting only that he was dressed in the style young clerks aspiring to dandyism customarily affected, and seemed to be doing well at roulette. But as he passed behind the fellow, Vere caught a whiff of the cigar, and it stopped him in his tracks.

  Only one tobacconist in London sold those particular cheroots. As Vere had pointed out to Mistress Thespian a week ago, they were unusually long and thin. He also could have told her that the tobacco was a special blend, and the limited stock was reserved exclusively for him. At certain social gatherings, among a select group of men who could appreciate them, Vere was more than happy to share.

  He had not joined such a gathering in months.

  And Joe Purvis had said she’d be here.

  Swallowing a smile, Vere moved closer.

  Roulette—or roly-poly, as it was commonly known—was all the rage in England.

  It was certainly popular in Jerrimer’s, Lydia discovered. The roulette room was thick with bodies, not all of them recently washed. Still, the air of the Marshalsea prison had been fouler, like that of many other places she’d known, and the cheroot clamped between her teeth helped mask the worst of the odors. Chewing on it also helped relieve her gnawing frustration while she pretended to watch the wheel.

  While she was aware of the heap of counters growing in front of her, they hardly signified, compared to the prize dangling a table’s length away.

  Coralie Brees stood at the end of that distance.

  Ruby drops hung from her ears. A ruby necklace circled her throat and a matching bracelet her wrist.

  The set matched Tamsin’s description and sketch perfectly.

  The small room was packed to suffocation. Amid the general jostling and elbowing, Madam Brees was unlikely to notice the few deft moves that would strip her of her stolen valuables.

  The problem was, those particular moves were not within Lydia’s range of skills but Helena’s, and she was miles away in Kensington.

  While knocking the bawd down and ripping the jewelry violently from her poxy body was well within Lydia’s repertoire, she knew this was neither the time nor the place for such methods.

  Even if she hadn’t been wearing a corset that severely hampered movement, she could list several excellent reasons for exercising self-restraint: dark, cramped quarters; no potential allies; a great many potential foes—especially if she were unmasked, which was bound to happen in a brawl—and the unmasking itself, which at best would result in humiliation and at worst severe, possibly fatal, injury.

  Yes, it was infuriating to see Tamsin’s jewelry adorning London’s most villainous bawd. Yes, it made one wild to think of the girl, and her beloved aunt, and what the jewelry represented.

  But no, Lydia was not going to let her temper get the better of her again. She most certainly would not let “thwarted desire” for the woman-despising Ainswood turn her into a temperamental eight-year-old.

  Thrusting away his image, she made herself focus coolly and calmly on the problem at hand.

  The wheel stopped at red, twenty-one.

  The croupier, stone-faced, pushed Lydia’s winnings toward her. At the same moment, she heard Coralie’s shrill stream of oaths.

  The procuress had been losing steadily for the last hour. Now, finally, she moved away from the roulette table.

  If she was out of money, she might trade in her jewelry as others had done their valuables, Lydia thought. She’d already discovered where those transactions took place.

  Swiftly she counted her winnings. Two hundred. Not much by the standards of some clubs—Crockford’s, for instance, where thousands were lost in the space of minutes—but perhaps enough to purchase a set of ruby jewelry from a trull with gaming fever.

  Lydia started pushing through the crowd.

  Intent on keeping her quarry in sight, she reflexively dodged a red-haired trollop who’d tried to attract her notice before, and elbowed aside a pickpocket. What Lydia failed to notice, in her haste to close the distance between her and Coralie, was the boot in the way.

  Lydia tripped over it.

  A hand clamped on her arm and jerked her upright. It was a large hand with a grasp like a vise.

  Lydia looked up…into glinting green eyes.

  Vere wondered what it would take to crack her polished veneer of composure.

  She only blinked once, then coolly withdrew the cigar from her mouth. “By gad, is that you, Ainswood? I haven’t seen you in a dog’s age. How’s the gout? Still troubling you?”

  Since he’d already spotted Coralie Brees—along with a pair of burly bodyguards—Vere dared not unmask Miss Sarah Siddons Grenville in the gambling hell.

  She kept up the act, and he played along with it while he swiftly escorted her from the premises. Even after they were clear of the place, he kept a firm grip on her arm, and marched her up St. James’s Street toward Piccadilly.

  She continued to swagger along, the stub of the cheroot—his cheroot—clamped between her white teeth, the walking stick swinging from her free hand.

  “This is getting to be a habit with you, Ainswood,” she said. “Whenever matters are moving along smoothly, you come along to muck them up. I was on a winning streak, in case you didn’t notice. Moreover, I was working. Since gainful employment is not within your range of experience, let me explain a bit about basic economics. If magazine writers fail to perform their assignments, there are no articles for the magazine. If there are no articles, the customers won’t buy it, because, you see, when they pay for a magazine, they expect it to have writing in it. And when the customers won’t pay, the writers don’t get paid.” She looked up at him. “Am I going too fast for you?”

  “You’d stopped playing roulette before I interrupted,” he said. “Because you’d decided on a different game. While you were watching the bawd, I was watching you. I’ve seen that look in your eyes before and know what it bodes: mayhem.”

  While he spoke, she coolly puffed on the cigar, to all appearances the unflappable young Cit-about-town her costume declared her. He fought an irrational urge to laugh.

  “Let me point out something you apparently failed to notice,” he went on. “The bawd had a pair of bully boys in attendance. If you’d followed her outside, those brutes would have dragged you into the nearest dark alley and carved you up into very small pieces.”

  By this time they’d reached Piccadilly.

  She tossed away the remains of the cheroot. “You refer to Josiah and Bill, I collect,” she said. “I should like to know how anyone
who wasn’t blind could overlook that pair of gargoyles.”

  “Your eyesight is hardly reliable. You overlooked me.” He signaled to a hackney leaving the water stand down the street.

  “I trust you’re summoning that carriage for yourself,” she said. “Because I have an assignment to complete.”

  “You’ll have to assign yourself someplace other than Jerrimer’s,” he said. “Because you’re not going back there. If I found you out, others might. If, as you suspect, any illegal activities are going on there, those conducting them will make sure Grenville of the Argus not only doesn’t complete her assignment, but is never heard from again.”

  “How did you know I was looking for illegal activities?” she demanded. “This assignment was supposed to be a secret.”

  The hackney pulled up. It was not one of Mr. David Davies’s compact new hackney cabriolets but a cumbersome vehicle which had evidently done service as a gentleman’s town coach about a century ago. The coachman sat in front, not in back as in the modern cabs. At the back was a narrow platform upon which a pair of footmen—long dead and buried by now—would have stood.

  “Where to, gentlemen?” the driver asked.

  “Soho Square,” Vere said.

  “Are you mad?” she cried. “I can’t go there in this costume.”

  “Why not?” He eyed her up and down. “Will you scare your sweet-tempered puppy?”

  “Campden Place, Kensington,” she told the driver. She yanked free of Vere’s grip, adding in lower tones, “You’ve made your point. I’m not going back to Jerrimer’s. If you figured out who I was, any moron might.”

  “But you live in Soho,” he said.

  “My clothes are in Kensington,” she said. “And my carriage.”

  “Gentlemen?” the driver called. “If you ain’t comin’—”

  She stalked to the vehicle, pulled open the door, and climbed in. Before she could shut it, Vere caught the handle.

  “It’s been a dog’s age since I’ve visited Kensington,” he said. “I wonder whether the country air will heal my gout.”

  “Kensington is very damp at this time of year,” she said in a low, hard voice. “If you want a change of climate, try the Gobi Desert.”

  “On second thought, maybe I’ll travel to a nice, warm brothel.” He slammed the door shut and walked away.

  Chapter 5

  By the time the hackney passed through the Hyde Park Turnpike, Lydia was well aware she had mainly herself to blame for this evening’s vexations.

  At the Blue Owl last week, she’d spotted Ainswood the instant he came to the doorway. Naturally, her pride wouldn’t let her exit the stage at that point. While only half a Ballister by birth, she was every inch one by nature. She couldn’t possibly curtail her performance or feel in the least embarrassed merely because a clodpole of a duke was watching.

  Still, she might at least have resisted the inner devil urging her to make sport of him, and chosen another target. Since, instead, she had asked for trouble, she should have realized, when it didn’t come then, that it was sure to come sooner or later. Like her, Ainswood had put on an act. He’d feigned good humor because he hadn’t wanted all those men to think a mere female could upset him.

  Lydia had upset him, though, and he must have returned to the Blue Owl this evening to get even in some way. There, someone who’d been at the last Argus staff meeting must have let drink or a bribe loosen his tongue, and told Ainswood where she was. His Grace had come to Jerrimer’s merely to disrupt whatever she was doing—whether it was work or play was all the same to him. Then, having wrecked everything, he could go on his merry, depraved way.

  And so, thanks to her own childish behavior—and his childish spitefulness—she’d lost a chance to get back Tamsin’s ruby set.

  Meanwhile, Ainswood would be congratulating himself for putting Lady Grendel in her place. He would probably make an amusing anecdote of the event, to entertain the company at the whorehouse he went to.

  He would probably still be laughing while he wrapped his powerful arms round a voluptuous tart, and nuzzled her neck and…

  I don’t care, she told herself.

  And perhaps the sensible and reasonable part of her truly didn’t care what he did with other women, and considered it far better that he’d gone.

  The devil inside her cared, though, because that part of her was as wild and wicked and shameless as he was.

  And that part of her, at the moment, was making her want to leap from the hackney and hunt him down and tear him from the anonymous harlot’s embrace.

  That part of her fretted and fumed all the way to Campden Place—not about Tamsin’s jewelry or an assignment interrupted, but about the taunting comment with which Ainswood had taken his leave and the way he’d slammed the coach door in Lydia’s face.

  Between composing a host of crushing setdowns she wished she’d administered and conjuring infuriating scenarios involving His Grace and painted harlots, it took Lydia a moment after the hackney halted to realize where she was.

  Hurriedly she disembarked, paid the driver, and started toward Helena’s house.

  Then she froze, her churning mind belatedly registering what her eyes had taken in: the handsome equipage standing a few yards from the gate.

  Helena had a visitor.

  And Lydia knew who it was because she’d made it her business to recognize the vehicle, in order to avoid its owner, Lord Sellowby.

  She glanced down the street, but the hackney was already beyond hailing distance.

  She swore under her breath.

  Then, after a furtive glance up at the house windows, she sauntered over to Sellowby’s carriage, exchanged pleasantries with his tiger, obtained directions to the nearest public house, and ambled on, ostensibly in that direction.

  Standing on the back platform of the ancient hackney for some three miles had not been the most comfortable mode of traveling. The sight before Vere at present, however, made up for the bone-shaking ride.

  Since he’d had the presence of mind to disembark while the hackney was slowing, he’d managed to duck into the shadows before his prey emerged. Obviously, she hadn’t the smallest suspicion that he’d followed her.

  Admittedly, he hadn’t had the smallest suspicion he’d be following her to the home of London’s priciest courtesan. When the blue-eyed gorgon had said her clothes and carriage were in Kensington, Vere supposed she’d done her costume change at an inn, where her comings and goings would attract little attention. He had envisioned an interesting encounter at the inn.

  But this, he decided, promised to turn out to be far more interesting.

  From his hiding place in the tall hedges of the garden he was watching her struggle out of her coat. Though the moon wasn’t full, it emitted enough light for him to observe the process.

  The coat was fashionably snug, and the armor she’d donned to conceal her shape hampered her movement to a comical degree. After a good deal of hopping, twisting, and jerking about, she finally got out of it and flung it down. Then she pulled off the hat, the wig underneath, and the skullcap under that, revealing the fair hair flattened and wrapped about her head.

  She scratched her head.

  Vere waited with bated breath for her to unpin her hair. It was thick, he knew, and must be long enough to tumble over her shoulders—and you’d think he was a schoolboy, to stand here breathlessly waiting for such a simple thing, as though he hadn’t watched hundreds of women take down their hair and take off their clothes.

  She was still fully covered, in shirt and pantaloons, yet his temperature climbed all the same. He told himself the hot reaction arose out of the depravity of what he was doing, hiding in the shadows watching her disrobe.

  But she didn’t take out so much as one hairpin or take off any more garments. What she did next was creep to the corner of the house, grasp the drainpipe, and swing herself up.

  Vere blinked once in disbelief, then ran toward her, heedless of the gravel crunching underfo
ot.

  Starting at the noise, she slipped and fell, landing with a soft thud upon the grass. Before she could scramble up, he grasped her upper arms and hauled her to her feet.

  “What in blazes do you think you’re doing?” he whispered.

  She wrenched free of his grasp. “What does it look like?” She rubbed her bottom. “Plague take you, I might have broken a leg. What the devil do you mean by creeping up on me? You’re supposed to be in a brothel.”

  “I lied,” he said. “I can’t believe you fell for that old going-to-a-brothel ruse. You didn’t even look out the window to make sure I’d gone away.”

  She didn’t try to hide her incredulity. “I don’t believe this. You can’t have hung on the back of the hackney the whole way.”

  “It’s only three miles,” he said.

  “Why?” she demanded. “What score are you trying to pay now?”

  He gave her a wounded look. “I was not trying to pay any scores. I was consumed by curiosity.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “About what?”

  “How you did it.” He let his gaze fall to her manly chest. “It isn’t binding, is it? What have you done with your breasts?”

  She opened her mouth, then shut it. She looked down at herself, then up at him. Then her jaw set and between her teeth she said, “It’s a specially designed corset. The front is shaped like a man’s torso. The back is like any other stays.”

  “Ah. Back lacing.”

  “Yes. Not in the least interesting. Nothing you haven’t seen many hundreds of times before.” She turned away and returned to the drainpipe. “If you want to make yourself useful, you could give me a boost up.”

  “I can’t,” he said. “I can’t aid and abet your burgling a house.”

  “Since when have you become a champion of law and order?”

  “Since you pointed out my failure to provide an example of high moral tone,” he said. “I’m studying to become a saint.”

  “Then study someplace else. I’m not going to steal anything. I only want to get my clothes.”