“Of course you’re welcome to visit us at our house. At the salon or any time.” Portia managed to make this sound like a genuine invitation, rather than a sop to Verity’s pride.
“But I’ll stop inviting Amelia here,” Verity said.
“Thank you, my dear. And if you would do me the favor of passing that message on to your brother . . .”
“As you wish.” She tried to keep the bitterness from her voice, but as soon as the words left her mouth, she knew she had failed.
“Don’t be like that, Verity.”
“I’m not being like anything,” Verity protested. “I’m . . . all right, I’m a bit put out to hear that you want me to bar the door to your daughters. But I see your point.” She let out a breath. “I just wish my brother weren’t carrying on in such a way as to make this necessary.”
“We have to be so careful, otherwise people are only too ready to remember who we are.” While nobody quite forgot that Portia had once been the late Lord Pembroke’s mistress, they had long since decided this was a point they were happy to disregard, so long as they were able to attend her salon. If one had any pretenses to sophistication, one arrived at the pragmatic conclusion that Mrs. Allenby, in her subdued but elegant attire, attended by her genteel and intelligent daughters, was no common bit of muslin. The fact that she never left the house in an ensemble costing less than a hundred guineas surely didn’t hurt matters.
“I’ll do whatever you need me to,” Verity agreed, trying to sound as if she did not mind being forced once again into the position of telling Nate what to do. “But I’ll warn you that Nate isn’t terribly interested in my wishes these days.” She arranged her inkwell so it covered up a blot of ink on her desk.
At this, Portia frowned, an expression of outright concern marring her usually placid countenance. “Your brother,” she said, “has always flown close to the sun.”
When Ash walked into the shop he found Nate tying up a parcel of books for Mrs. Allenby. He was deeply and mortifyingly aware that he would have liked Portia Allenby a good deal more if she hadn’t been Verity’s lover. Ash understood that he and Verity could never be together, and he accepted as the logical and reasonable conclusion that she would seek the company of other people. Indeed, he wished her well, in a theoretical sort of way. He just didn’t want to know about it. It wasn’t envy or even jealousy, he told himself, but one of their distant and quieter cousins; he couldn’t be jealous while warding off the warmer feelings towards Verity that he was susceptible to. And he needed to not only ward off those feelings but banish them to the iciest reaches of his mind. Verity and Nate were dear to him, and he couldn’t let his emotional flights of fancy compromise this makeshift family they had assembled.
As he held the door open for Mrs. Allenby, he saw that the sign over the door was peeling. It was hard to guess that the letters were supposed to spell out Plum & Co. He had the stray notion that he ought to tell Verity, but she had likely noticed months ago. Since returning from Bath, he had been struck by the change in the household: cheap cuts of meat, no fires in the bedrooms, corners that hadn’t been dusted in a good while. The Register was now printed on a paper cheap enough to see through. Verity was saving pennies against an uncertain future. With the same sense of loss that he had while he watched Roger’s ship sail away, he realized that it was not at all a sure thing that there would even be a Plum & Company a year from now.
“What miseries are you thinking of, Ash? Your face is—” Nate came out from behind the counter, arranging his own handsome face into a tragic mask.
“Economics.”
“Cheerful as ever.”
“You’re one to talk. I read the latest Register and nearly walked straight into the Thames.”
“That’s how you’re meant to feel. Then you get to the end—”
“Where you dream of the hopeful future in which Lord Sidmouth is sent to the guillotine?”
“Be fair, Ash.” Nate scuffed his boot on the floor. “I don’t mention the guillotine by name. I just mention that we all know how tyrants wind up sometimes.”
Ash closed his eyes. “You made a pun about heads, Nathaniel.” If he kept going like this, his arrest was inevitable. And if he were convicted, he would be sent away for years, maybe transported, maybe even sentenced to death like those unfortunates in Pentrich. Watching Nate flirt with arrest filled him with the same panicked dread with which he imagined Roger hundreds of miles away.
“I can’t do any more prints for you,” Ash said. In the past he had done at least one satire for the Register each month, along with his more lucrative work engraving fashion plates and frontispieces. “Prison wouldn’t agree with me.”
“Oh, quite right, that.” He frowned apologetically, and the expression revealed lines of worry on his face.
“Are you sleeping, Nate?” Ash asked. Their rooms shared a wall, and sometimes Ash heard stirring from his friend’s chamber well past midnight. Nate had never been a sound sleeper, and seemed to require only half the sleep of the average person, but now he looked haggard.
“Not much. And what sleep I get is . . . not good.” Ash reached out to put a sympathetic hand on Nate’s shoulder. “I’m not going to feel bad for myself,” Nate insisted. “There are bigger troubles in the world than my bad dreams.”
“If you put them aside just for an evening, you might wake and feel even more equipped to fight some of those troubles,” Ash said, squeezing his friend’s shoulder before dropping his hand.
“It’s not like that. I can’t just take off my worries like an ill-fitting coat.” He frowned at Ash. “Talk about something else, will you?”
“What was Mrs. Allenby doing here?” Ash tried to sound casual.
“She called on Verity for a quarter of an hour. I don’t think they’re resuming their . . .” He made a vague gesture that Ash decided was meant to suggest sexual congress. “If that’s what you’re asking.”
“Ah.” Ash tried not to sound relieved. “I didn’t realize their . . . liaison had ended.”
“And it’s a damned pity, because my sister was a lot easier to deal with when she was going to bed with Portia. I don’t even like the woman, filthy snob that she is. But I’d dearly like Verity to take up with almost anybody if it meant she’d stop nagging me for half a minute.”
Ash bit back a smile at the reminder that Nate was more concerned with the political inclinations of his sister’s lover than with her gender. A sapphic love affair with a proper revolutionary would be entirely satisfactory as far as Nate was concerned.
Ash climbed the stairs and found Verity sitting at her desk, a stack of magazines before her. It was only noon, but already her hair had escaped the confines of her coiffure, and no fewer than three ink spots adorned her face.
“Oh, there you are, Ash. Where have you been?” She gestured at the portfolio he carried.
“Southampton Street. I had to drop off the finished plates.”
“Oooh,” Verity said with an enthusiasm that was neither facetious nor completely sincere. “What will the ladies be wearing this winter?”
“The usual. Fur and velvet and miles of blond lace. Enough to have one longing for the guillotine along with your brother.” Ash was not unaware of the tension between his two principal sources of employment—drawing political caricatures for radical pamphlets, and producing fashion plates designed to sell ridiculous fripperies at unconscionable prices to people who had more money than anybody needed, all while their fellow men starved in the street. “The good news is that waistlines will be dropping.”
“Well, they could hardly go any higher. Today Portia had on a gown that shouldn’t be physically possible.”
“Annie,” he said, referring to the dressmaker who was his principal source when drawing fashion plates, “says that now every shopgirl has hoisted her bosoms up to her armpits, the ladies will allow theirs to descend.”
“What a relief,” Verity said, affecting a refined accent. “One does like to breat
he.” Verity herself had on a simple brown woolen frock, with a plain cambric fichu tucked into the neckline. He knew she also had a black dress, equally plain and severe, because he had seen her wear it to the gravesides of both her parents. “Do you think I could write an advice column?”
Ash strove to find a diplomatic way to say No, definitely not. “Well, perhaps of the more bracing sort. Some people do like being flogged. Specialized interest, you know.”
“I can be sympathetic,” she protested.
“To people you agree with, certainly.”
“Am I really that bad?”
“There’s nothing bad about it. You’re uncompromising. It’s one of the things I like best about you. But why are you writing an advice column?”
“I’ve decided to start a ladies’ magazine. Advice columns seem to be common, and they’re among the features I could conceivably write myself, which would make it cheap to put together. A serialized novel, some theater reviews, maybe a fashion plate if you’d oblige.”
“Did I hear somebody say advice columns?” asked Nate, appearing in the doorway. “Are we talking about Mrs. Merriweather?” All traces of his earlier worry were gone from his face, and he looked like the mischievous, cheerful lad he had been not so long ago. “I think I want to marry Mrs. Merriweather,” he said, putting a hand over his heart and striking what he doubtless thought a romantic pose.
“I want to elect Mrs. Merriweather to Parliament,” Ash mused.
“Don’t tell me you both read the Ladies Gazette?” Verity asked.
“The Gazette, the Ladies’ Mercury, the Lady’s Magazine, all of them. But Mrs. Merriweather at the Gazette is the best of the lot.”
“Dear Mrs. Merriweather,” Ash said, as if reading aloud. “I discovered that my husband has a wife and children in Barnstaple—”
“This other wife is a very low sort—” Nate chimed in.
“Wears the cheapest muslin frocks—”
“Puts the milk in first—”
“So ought I to run off with the vicar or the canon?”
Nate burst out laughing, and when Ash glanced over at Verity, he saw that she was trying to suppress a smile but making a very poor fist of it. “I hope you’re both amused with yourselves,” she said shaking her head. “Utter children.”
“What would you advise that letter writer?” Ash asked. “In your theoretical problem page.”
“The situation you put before me is nonsense,” Verity insisted.
“No it isn’t,” Ash and Nate answered at once.
“It’s bigamy eight times out of ten,” Nate added.
“The other two times are people whose servants have stolen either the silver or their employers’ hearts,” Ash added.
“I suppose it mainly depends on whether her husband married her or the Barnstaple woman first,” Verity mused. “If the Barnstaple woman is his lawful wife, then the letter writer is well shot of him and can run off with as many clerics as she pleases. But if she’s the lawful wife, she and the Barnstaple woman ought to join forces to have him sent to Australia.”
“Prosecuted for bigamy and then transported, you mean?” Ash asked.
“Indeed not. I was thinking they could simply have him press-ganged or taken by pirates. Barnstaple is close enough to Cornwall, and my understanding is that piracy is still an ongoing concern in those parts.”
Both men tilted their heads and regarded her. “Just out of curiosity, how often would you advise women with errant husbands to have their spouses abducted by pirates?” Nate asked.
“I’d have to look into the costs. Right now it occurs to me that one might arrange one’s obnoxious brother to be taken away. Might be worth a few pounds, especially if you keep bringing strangers to eat my mutton chops.”
“They weren’t strangers!”
“Portia says we’re not to have Amelia here anymore, because it won’t do for a young lady to be an accessory before the fact.”
“An accessory before what fact?” Nate asked.
“Sedition,” Ash and Verity said at once with equal measures of exasperation.
“But I like Amelia,” Nate said petulantly, as if referring to a favorite pet mouse. “Devilish clever girl.”
“Yes, well, try to like her enough not to get her into any trouble. Oh, Ash, I have something for you. Well, it isn’t for you, strictly speaking, but I think it might interest you.” She began rifling through the stack of magazines and assorted papers on her desk. “Aha! Here it is.”
He took the letter from her outstretched hand. It was fine linen paper, much finer than anything Ash usually encountered, the sort he had forgotten even existed. Even the sealing wax looked a cut above the usual. The writing was an even, legible, feminine hand.
“The general thrust of the letter is that a lady botanist needs someone to draw her specimens,” Verity said.
At the top of the page was a family crest and a Cavendish Square address. The signature was of a Lady Caroline Talbot. “No,” Ash said. “I’m not earning my bread by drawing the hothouse flowers of some lady dilettante.”
“But you’ll draw the gowns they wear,” Verity pointed out.
“I do those for one of your rival publishers, not for the leisured classes.”
“Look, it’s an opportunity to take money from the rich, without having to compromise your morals. I thought it might interest you, because, well, you’re certainly not going to be doing any drawings for the Register.” She said this so matter-of-factly, as if it hadn’t pained him to realize illustrating the Register was no longer a risk he could take. “I just thought this would be a way for you to branch out a bit. She’ll probably pay better than I do.”
“She could hardly pay worse,” Nate remarked from where he still stood in the doorway.
“Nathaniel,” Verity said bracingly, “if you want to pay our writers and illustrators better, consider doing something that will turn a profit without getting your colleagues sent to prison. For heaven’s sake.”
Nate threw his hands up in surrender and left them alone.
“Is he deluded?” Verity asked. “Or is he deliberately trying to drive me mad?”
“I think he has different priorities than you,” Ash said carefully, conscious that he could not take sides between them without toppling the three-legged stool that was their friendship.
“My priorities are eating and not getting arrested.”
“So are mine. But your brother is . . .” He shook his head. “Is it ludicrous to call him a genius when we both know he sometimes goes out in mismatched boots?”
That got a smile from her and he was glad of it. But it quickly dropped from her face. “He gets to be a genius, while I balance the books and haggle with tradespeople.” Then she abruptly shook her head as if dislodging the thought. “I’m being silly. Now, sit down and tell me more about what to put in this advice column.”
There wasn’t a world where Ash could resist anything Verity asked of him, so he sat.
Chapter Three
Clutching the manuscript under her arm, Verity ran up the stairs to the top floor. Bit by bit during the two weeks since Ash returned to London, he and Nate dragged all his equipment out of the box room and set it up in the attic Ash declared to be the only place in the house with enough light to work by and enough air for him not to choke on the rosin powder he used when preparing a plate to engrave.
She paused in the open doorway, trying to make sense of the sight before her. She expected to find Ash at work, drawing with pen and ink or using the fine tools he used to produce plates for engraving. Instead, he sat on the sill of the open window, one booted foot braced on the floor, his upper body leaning out.
“Left!” he called below. “No, your left. The other left! Good Christ, Nate, left! There you go. All right, now hold it slack.” He ducked back into the room. “Oh, good,” he said upon seeing Verity. “Hold this, will you?” He held out one end of a cord that continued out the window.
Still unclear about w
hat she was witnessing, she crossed the room and mutely took hold of the cord while Ash climbed onto the windowsill and hammered a nail into the top of the casement. This brought her within inches of the pair of buckskin breeches he wore. Usually he dressed in town clothes—the respectable coats and trousers of a reasonably prosperous artisan. The buckskins were entirely different. They fit close to his skin, skimming over muscled thighs and up . . . Verity jerked her head away before she could let her gaze follow the direction of her thoughts. Suddenly very conscious of the parcel she still carried under one arm, Verity felt her cheeks heat. Well-worn buckskin breeches, she decided, made it very difficult to maintain a businesslike sense of decorum.
“All right,” Ash said, holding out his hand.
“What?” she asked, dazed.
“The cord, Plum.”
“Right. The cord.” She passed it up to him and watched as he looped it through what appeared to be an eyelet at the end of the nail.
“All clear on this end,” Ash called out the window. A moment later she heard her brother’s voice shout something indistinct, and Ash gave the cord a few quick tugs. She could hear a bell ringing down below.
“It’s in case I have a seizure,” Ash said, shutting the window. She saw that there was a hole in the casement for the cord to pass through. “The cord rings a bell in the kitchen and another in the shop.”
“Oh, how clever. How long has it been since you had an episode?”
“Last year, when we all had influenza.” Ash had spent a fortnight with the Plums to spare Roger the risk of infection. Verity, who had recovered first, had been the one to help Ash during his seizure, which had entailed shoving a pillow under his head and reassuring him afterward that all was well.
“That was nearly a year ago. That’s very good, isn’t it?”
“Indeed.” He brushed some dust off his breeches. “It makes me fear that I’m due for one soon, although Nate tells me this isn’t how odds work.”
A Duke in Disguise Page 3
