Hot, furious breaths shredded her lungs as she pulled them in and out.
To write to her as though they were equals!
But aren’t you? said some unwelcome, bitterly rational voice in her head.
Two women impoverished by the same man?
And Delilah was no one without a man, wasn’t that so? Her title meant not a thing when she hadn’t inherited it and she was poor.
Vertigo swept in. The husband, the land, the manners, the clothes, the vases and rugs, the friends, the horses, the barouche, the jewels, her favorite chair by the solarium window. How odd that they formed the fabric of her life, and yet none of it was hers. Her very personality wasn’t hers. It was something she’d donned like widow’s weeds or a pantomime costume in order to play her role. Who was she? Did she even exist? Perhaps this was all a dream. But would that be better?
She held the crumpled note in her fist while Mackintosh eyed her warily, his shoulders hunched as though he was prepared to dive beneath his desk. Perhaps her expression suggested she intended to hurl it.
She stuffed it into her reticule instead, next to that jingling ring of keys.
Her life thus far: nearly two decades of fear and ceaseless tension of poverty, followed by six years of relief and luxury and boredom and tolerance.
And now, it seemed, hideous fear was having a turn again.
She thought these thoughts on the way back to a house that didn’t belong to her, in the carriage that didn’t belong to her, drawn by horses that didn’t belong to her, driven by a driver whose expression was, as he handed her in, cagey—when days before it had been all warm deference. She knew that all the servants in London were part of a circulatory system and word would get out, quickly, that Derring’s life was being dismantled because he owned none of it.
The shock. The shame.
She leaned her aching head against the cool carriage window.
She’d likely return to a townhouse of dead fires and unlit stoves and dark chandeliers.
The staff would, quite pragmatically, flee if they hadn’t already with their satchels of belongings (but hopefully not the silver), confident of being absorbed into other fine households, because Delilah had a particular skill for hiring the very best staff.
With the exception of Dorothy. Delilah had taken on Dorothy as a lady’s maid—such a sweet girl, all shy smiles and eagerness to please—in a fit of outraged mercy when she’d been dismissed without references by the Duchess of Brexford. But a few years with Dorothy had brought Delilah closer to an understanding of martyrdom. Dot burned, spilled, dropped, and broke things. Daily. She tried so very hard and meant so very well and yet she revealed a talent for nothing except cheerful devotion. Delilah hadn’t the heart to let her go.
What would become of Dorothy?
Or of Mrs. Helga, the magically talented cook, warm of heart and loud of laugh, who was the heartbeat of the kitchen? Her apple tarts and lemon seed cakes and rich sauces were the stuff of heaven. Countesses and duchesses would wrestle in a pit of mud in the middle of Almack’s for the services of a cook like that.
And what about me?
Thank God her parents were now dead, she thought mordantly. They would not have to witness this or experience poverty again.
Should she throw herself on the mercy of Derring’s nephew, who would inherit the family estate? Should she write to her cousins in America to ask if they could use an additional relative to feed? Her mind recoiled from every option it touched on.
Perhaps this was why their circle of acquaintances, and even women she’d considered friends—like Lady Ragland and Lady Corvalle, women with whom she’d dined and shopped and gossiped—had seemed to subtly fan away from her after Derring’s funeral, like fleas disembarking from a dead dog. They’d all known. A little debt was one thing. Penury was quite another, she supposed.
The scorching shame of it.
She shifted her reticule in her lap and the great wad of keys jingled.
She poured them out into her hand and as she did, the crumpled message tumbled out with it.
She’d forgotten she’d stuffed it in there.
After a hesitation, she smoothed it out and read it again in the carriage’s dim light.
And now she understood why she’d kept it.
Because there was something indomitable about it. A sort of dry, worldly wit that wasn’t without sympathy. It included Delilah in the joke. Inherent in it was the assumption that Delilah was that sort of woman, too: Strong. Mordant. Resilient.
Was she?
If she had loved her husband this revelation of—betrayal? Humiliation? Neither word truly fit, if she was being honest, and all she wanted, for the rest of her life, was to be honest, to be who she truly was—might have been the undoing of her.
How odd to regret that she wasn’t undone by the knowledge of her husband’s mistress.
Her pride was scorched. But scorched pride seemed the least of her concerns.
And it seemed she hadn’t known her husband at all, because he hadn’t seen fit to let himself be known.
Then again, he hadn’t truly known her, either.
Which might very well be the only reason he’d ever married her at all.
When they arrived in Grosvenor Square, the door of their townhouse was propped open, and two snickering men were ferrying out a mostly nude statue. Daphne becoming a laurel tree to get away from Apollo.
Lucky Daphne, Delilah thought, to have such an appealing option. At least she knew how she’d be spending eternity.
“Jamesy, why is a woman made of stone better than a real woman?” One of the men was bellowing over his shoulder to his friend.
“Why, Jonesy?”
“Her nips are already—”
They saw her and clapped their mouths closed.
She gave them the icy, quelling look they deserved.
Derring had filled a gallery with those statues, many of them all but naked, all pectorals and penises and nipples and curving buttocks and aquiline noses, and quite expensive, so uncharacteristically sensual a collection for a man as rigid as Derring. Of some ordinary stone, not marble or alabaster, they ought to have been in a garden somewhere, she’d always thought.
And there they were, lined up to be loaded into carts like so many shamed orgy attendees.
In broad daylight.
She could practically feel the breeze created by her nosy neighbors abruptly dropping curtains when she’d appeared.
Delilah hiked her skirts in her hands and dashed up the stairs and through the broad double doors. And then she heaved them shut and threw the bolts behind her. She was halfway across the foyer when she stopped abruptly: her footsteps were echoing oddly, dizzyingly.
All at once she realized that it was because everything that had once genteelly cushioned her life—acres of plush, patterned Axminster, velvet curtains bound in tasseled golden ropes, the plump settees on their little bowed legs—was gone.
Her stomach was ice once again.
She stared down at the floor contemplatively, as if it were the sea she intended to cast herself into.
And then she ran, her footsteps eerily clattering as though there were an entire herd of Delilahs chasing her, and bounded up the stairs to her rooms. She lost a slipper (dyed black satin with a tiny heel, unpaid for) on the way.
She skidded to a panting stop at the doorway of her chambers.
Astonishingly, everything—the mirror, the wardrobe, the writing desk and chair, her bed with its fluffed pillows, the rose-and-cream carpet—was still precisely as she left it.
There sat Dorothy on her bed, holding a hatpin in one fist and a knitting needle in the other, like a Turk wielding two scimitars. Her big blue eyes were fierce.
“I wouldn’t let them through, Lady Derring. They just laughed and said they’d be back on the morrow.”
“Oh, Dorothy. How valiant. Lay those weapons down so that I may hug you.”
Dot obeyed.
And Delilah ga
ve her a quick, fierce squeeze.
“What is happening, Lady Derring?”
“Well, creditors are taking our possessions away. It seems Derring was in a bit of a financial bind. I’ve only just learned this myself from the solicitor. He didn’t mean to leave us this way, but it cannot be helped. I didn’t know it would happen, and I am in a bind, too.” She kept her voice bright, for Dot’s sake. “We will need to leave here within a week as the rent has not been paid. Now, I will write you a letter of reference so you can find another—”
“Oh, I would never dream of leaving you, Lady Derring.” Her eyes were wide and earnest.
This was precisely what Delilah was afraid of.
“Who else would have me?” Dot added practically, showing an uncharacteristic sense of self-awareness that lacked self-pity. Or pity for anyone else who employed her, for that matter.
As this was all too true, Delilah said, “Oh, now.”
All at once, she was pathetically glad to not be alone. Dorothy’s loyalty was touching.
And suddenly, now that she was responsible for someone other than herself, she could think more clearly.
“What about Mrs. Blenkenship?” she said, furiously thinking. She was the head housekeeper, who had a ring of keys very similar to the ones now stuffed in Delilah’s reticule.
“Went off to the Duchess of Brexford straight away. The duchess fired her own housekeeper to get her.” Dot said this with some awe.
Perversely, Delilah was proud. Her staff was the best.
“And Mrs. Vogel? Helga?”
“The Duchess of Brexford,” Dot confirmed.
“The Duchess of Brexford again? That . . .” She considered which word to use, then chose the one that fit best. “Bitch.”
“Lady Derring!” Dot breathed, delightedly scandalized.
Odd that uttering the word gave her a little burst of energy. She’d never before said such a thing out loud. So that’s why people did it.
Not that she intended to make a habit of it.
Then again, she was apparently a woman who owned a building by the docks, so maybe it was appropriate.
“Oh, Lady Derring, what will we do?”
Delilah didn’t answer. She stood slowly, and ventured toward Derring’s room, adjoining hers.
It had been all but stripped of its furnishings and appointments.
A coat lay on the floor. She hesitated.
Then lifted and smelled it.
And dropped it immediately. It reeked of those cigars.
It ought to have been poignant. But it brought with it a sizzling fury.
And with fury came clarity.
“Come with me, Dot.” She seized Dorothy by the arm and led her down the stairs, retrieving her shoe on the fourth step, then headed out the kitchen door.
“It might be helpful for you to know, Lord Kinbrook, that I haven’t a soul. I found it an encumbrance in my line of work.”
Captain Tristan Hardy explained this in a kindly tone to the aristocrat who sat across from him and was sweating nearly through his Weston-tailored coat.
White’s was crowded tonight. Waiters bearing trays disappeared into and emerged from clouds of cigar smoke like genies coaxed from bottles. Spirits were high. Laughter loud.
Not at his table, of course.
Captain Hardy was not a member of White’s, as he was not a gentleman in any sense of the word. His manners, though exquisite, were acquired, not innate; he wielded them, like his charm, the way he wielded a sword: strategically, only when necessary, and, if need be, ruthlessly. Nor was he likely to be invited here merely for the pleasure of his company. “Why, he’s a right bastard, ain’t he?” was often the delayed, rather surprised conclusion after a conversation with Captain Hardy. The surprise was because Captain Hardy was so charming and well-spoken and, indeed, a truly fine specimen of a man, the realization that he’d ruthlessly maneuvered them into a confession of some sort arrived with a delayed sort of shock.
From a distance, he didn’t look very different from Lord Kinbrook. The buttons on his coat gleamed; they were silver. The toes of his boots mirrored the overhead chandeliers. They were made by Hoby. But after a second glance somehow it was clear that he was constructed of different material than the men surrounding him. Shaped by entirely different forces.
“You’d sooner want to walk about with a wolf on a lead, darling,” wiser women told the women whose eyes inevitably hungrily followed him.
But heads invariably turned to follow him when he entered the room; gazes often settled upon him, unconsciously drawn. The way one’s eyes would follow a mysterious ship sailing into port, uncertain of its provenance or the number of cannons it carried.
So if Lord Kinbrook thought Tristan would blink, he was in for a long wait.
“It’s true,” Lieutenant Massey said. “I witnessed the transaction meself. The devil, ’e says, I’ll take your soul off ye, Tristan Jeremiah Hardy, if ye’d like to catch your man every time.”
“A fair bargain,” Tristan agreed placidly, in almost a drawl. “Because all I’ve ever wanted is to catch my man.”
His middle name wasn’t Jeremiah. As far as he knew, anyway.
Lord Kinbrook’s antipathy radiated from him. His broad pale brow gleamed damply; the sweat threatened to bead and pour. That was the thing with gentlemen: they never expected to be caught, let alone punished. They thought they could do anything they wanted to do, so they never practiced subterfuge or deception. Tristan almost had more respect for the thieves in Newgate awaiting the noose or deportation, who at least applied some effort to lying. Survival of the wiliest. He ought to know.
One of the other things he knew was that all men and women were the same beneath the skin. Title or no title. He had no illusions about gentlemen or gentlewomen possessing more honor.
“Handkerchief?” Tristan asked politely. He produced one. Lawn. White. He hadn’t any females in his life who would soften the sharp, plain corners of his life with things like embroidered initials. Women, like embroidery, were complications.
Lord Kinbrook stared at it as if Tristan had extended a handful of dog feces.
Then he looked back into Tristan’s face resentfully.
“I don’t know how I can help you, Captain Hardy.”
Tristan leaned back in his chair and sighed at length. He gave a thoughtful drum of his fingers on the table.
He accepted a brandy from a passing waiter.
Kinbrook looked stubborn, yet wretched.
“Have you a favorite hunting dog, Lord Kinbrook?” Tristan asked lightly. “One who simply never gives up, and never disappoints you, and always finds its quarry?”
Kinbrook brightened cautiously at the change in topic. “Yes. Darby is his name. A spaniel. Raised him from a pup.”
“I am the king’s favorite hunting dog.”
Kinbrook’s face fell almost comically.
“No one but the king calls me to heel.” He didn’t add that the king hadn’t called him to heel yet, and that there was no certainty he would obey if that should happen. The arrangement had suited both of them thus far. This time both the king and Tristan had a far more personal interest in hunting down their quarry, for slightly different reasons. “Answer my question and we’ll be off. Clearly you know you’re in possession of contraband. If you don’t tell me how you happened to have those cigars, we’ll only try another way, and another way, each increasingly uncomfortable for you. It’s all I know how to do, and all I truly enjoy. I’m a simple man.”
He shrugged with one shoulder.
This wasn’t quite hyperbole. There wasn’t much Tristan hadn’t sampled or witnessed in his life, from violence to lust to humiliation to opium to triumph to heartbreak. It was all useful. It had all been distilled into a man singular, and perhaps deadly, of purpose.
Lord Kinbrook stared at him, loathing thinly veiled.
“Come,” he cajoled with a sort of menacing tenderness. “Look into my eyes. Do you think I ever say anyth
ing I don’t mean, Lord Kinbrook?”
Kinbrook looked.
Whatever he saw there made him quickly look away.
He swallowed.
Tristan heaved a sigh, and thunked his brandy glass down on the table.
“Derring,” Kinbrook muttered tersely.
“Is that a compliment? An epithet?”
“The Earl of Derring. He snuffed it in that chair over there two weeks ago.” He gestured with his chin. “Doubtless you’ve heard about it. Not every day an earl dies in public, surrounded by young loobies, without issue. I got the cigars from Derring. I don’t know where he got them.”
The chair in question was occupied now by a young man leaning forward and laughing, mouth wide open, hands on his knees, at another man who was pantomiming riding a horse, slapping his own arse and tossing his head.
Tristan stared at that. How on earth—why on earth—was that amusing? Tristan was thirty-six years old. He sometimes felt he’d lived a thousand years and a thousand lives. If one started out life in St. Giles, you either grew old quickly or didn’t grow old at all. It would never occur to him to slap his own arse for any reason.
“Convenient to blame a dead man,” he said idly to Kinbrook. “Wouldn’t you say, Massey?”
“Seems a bit facile, guv,” he said regretfully, to Lord Kinbrook.
Tristan spared a single arced brow for the word facile.
The grim line of Kinbrook’s mouth suggested he did not like the word guv.
But both he and Massey knew that most roads led to Derring.
“Nevertheless. I got the cigars from Derring. If you’re wondering what the Fourth Earl of Derring would be doing mixed up in such an affair, well, desperate men do desperate things.”
“In what way was a man like the Earl of Derring desperate?”
“He liked fine things, didn’t he? Rumor has it that he was up to his eyebrows in debt. I wasn’t privy to all of this. I do know his property has been snaffled up by creditors. Thought I might have a run at his widow. I always rather envied him his young, beautiful wife. Mine is getting on, you see.” He paused, as if waiting for some sign of approbation from either of the two men. “Derring’s widow . . . penniless, pretty, quiet, pliant, used to a certain lifestyle . . . doubtless she’s quite frightened right now.” He smiled as if this was a charming thing for a woman to be. “She should be easy pickings.”
Lady Derring Takes a Lover Page 2
