Lady Derring Takes a Lover

by Julie Anne Long

  “Now we’ll drink to dear, dull, dead Derring,” Angelique said.

  Frances thunked it down on the table in front of Delilah. “Oh, Derring!” Fran crowed. “Annie, wasn’t he the one what asked whether you’d be willing to get down on all fours and crow like a—”

  “Finish that sentence, and it will be your last,” Angelique said with deadly calm.

  Frances froze in shock. Then she raised her hands as if in surrender. “My apologies. No harm meant, Mrs. Breedlove.”

  She backed away on her tiptoes, arms raised in the air.

  Delilah’s jaw had swung open.

  There transpired an exceedingly awkward moment, during which Delilah said aloud only one of the dozens of things she was thinking. As it so happened, it was the one thing guaranteed to appall her mother.

  “I wish I could get away with saying that sort of thing. What you just said to Fran.”

  Mrs. Breedlove looked a trifle ruffled, however. Perhaps embarrassed. “You are better off not knowing about that sort of thing, Lady Derring. And no. She was mistaken. Derring had no imagination at all.”

  Delilah had no real idea what any of this meant, though she suspected it was appallingly sexual. No amount of sherry would persuade her to ask Angelique to expound on that. Perversely, she was both resentful of and grateful for her own naivete, and a trifle irritated by Mrs. Breedlove’s assumption of it.

  “I will take your word for it, now, Mrs. Breedlove. I expect you are uncomfortable expounding. But I think I shall decide what I’m better off not knowing.”

  Mrs. Breedlove tipped her head and studied Delilah as if she were a cunning little jewel box and she’d just noticed she had a hidden compartment.

  “Drink it,” Mrs. Breedlove advised firmly, but gently. “The sherry.”

  Delilah sighed. They raised their glasses simultaneously and ironically clinked them together. Delilah threw hers back like she’d seen men do, and swallowed.

  She gasped. Her eyelashes whirred as water flooded her eyes.

  Then a lovely warmth spread from her diaphragm out in little tributaries in her body. Simultaneously reviving and anesthetizing. Magical, really.

  “Well,” she said. Intrigued.

  “Smooths the edges a bit, yes?” Angelique was amused. She’d sipped hers. Even though only a tiny amount remained.

  “Rather.” As she had earlier with cursing, she understood, suddenly, the point of a little alcohol.

  They sat in silence a moment.

  “You didn’t love Derring, either,” Mrs. Breedlove said. It sounded oddly sympathetic.

  Delilah’s jaw dropped. “Of course I . . .”

  Hell’s teeth. She hadn’t the strength to continue to prop up her own facade.

  She lowered her voice. “What makes you say that?”

  “You’re a woman of feeling, clearly, but none of your feelings seem to be shredding grief for your late husband.”

  Delilah breathed in and released the breath slowly. Behind her, both the fire and the man snoring next to it crackled.

  “I tried.” Her voice was hoarse. He’d frowned in discomfort when she was playful or laughed too loud. And yet he always, always expected her to smile.

  And suddenly the regret for years she’d lost in that loveless stasis was lacerating. To what end? She had ensured the last years of her parents’ lives were comfortable. Was safety worth it?

  “I was grateful to him.” Her voice was frayed. “I truly was. He wanted an heir. And I felt as though I failed him. I wanted children, and a house full of music, of—”

  “Guilt is ballast,” Angelique said startlingly firmly. “Release it. It won’t serve you in your—our—current circumstances.”

  Ah, yes. The current circumstances.

  Delilah fell silent again, as the current circumstances asserted themselves through remembering where they were: a pub by the docks, because she was penniless.

  “He held you in the utmost esteem, you know,” Angelique said gently, ironically. “Derring did.”

  She didn’t know what to say to that. It seemed impossible that you could truly care for someone and leave them ignorant of living on the knife-edge of disaster.

  “If only one could pay the landlord with esteem,” Delilah mused.

  Angelique gave another slow smile, as if everything about Delilah was both unexpected and a little entertaining.

  “Haven’t you family, Lady Derring? A place to live?”

  Delilah slowly shook her head. “I was an only child. I haven’t family on this continent, anyhow. I have Dot.” They looked over at Dot, her petite frame slumped in the chair, mouth open, snoring softly. “She’s the only one who didn’t flee. And . . . I haven’t decided yet where I might go. My options are limited and unattractive and involve begging for charity.”

  Angelique quirked the corner of her mouth. “I had two servants who abandoned me with alacrity when they sussed out the state of things. And no place to go.”

  She tapped her fingers against her sherry glass. “Imagine a world in which someone can buy an entire life—and two entire women—on credit propped up by virtue of a title. An accident of birth. Though of course some of them think their titles are ordained by God. The world is ridiculous.”

  She said this last word with surprising venom.

  Which made Delilah realize that Mrs. Breedlove was not so much cool as very, very controlled. That beneath her facade was, as she put it, a woman of feeling, and those feelings were as seething and complex as her own.

  “How did you come to be here, in this pub, tonight, Mrs. Breedlove?”

  Angelique sighed. “Oddly, it was where I met Derring. That’s the briefest answer.”

  “You met Derring here? But how did . . .”

  “I should like to briefly outline the events that led to our meeting. I will omit unnecessary details for the sake of brevity.”

  Delilah nodded. “Very well. Carry on.”

  “My mother died when I was young. My brother died in the war. My father was a surgeon and believed in educating girls, so I had excellent tutors. I can speak and write in several languages,” she said with a flash of faintly defensive pride. “But then my father fell gravely ill and to support us I became a governess for a wealthy family who had two young daughters.”

  “Ah!” Delilah inadvertently said aloud. She could easily imagine Angelique as a governess. Bossy and certain of herself.

  “The father of this family . . . took a fancy to me.” She cleared her throat. “He was handsome and persistent. I was flattered and naive and a little frightened. And then I was quite ruined. Dismissed from my position and turned out by the lady of the house just after my father died.”

  She relayed this as steadily as a governess conducting a grammar lesson, but her hand had closed around her sherry glass as if it were the one thing anchoring her to the earth. Her knuckles were as white as little skulls. She didn’t wait for a response, and Delilah didn’t say a word. The muscles of her stomach had contracted.

  “Without references, I could no longer work as a governess. None of my relatives—I’ve an uncle in Scotland, and an aunt and some cousins in Devonshire—were willing to take me in after that debacle. Eventually I found work in a tailor’s shop down the road from this pub. My needlework is fine and I’m unafraid of hard work.” Her chin went up a little. “Customers hailed from all walks of life and I found the variety refreshing, oddly. A young lord, very handsome, visited the shop often. He persuaded me he was in love with me and convinced me to go away with him to Scotland. I thought we were headed for Gretna Green.”

  Suddenly she stopped as though she’d encountered an iceberg and wasn’t quite certain how to navigate around it.

  She looked down at the table a moment, as though her composure could be found there.

  Delilah’s stomach contracted in fear of what was to come.

  Angelique lifted her head. “In Scotland, in a room above an inn, he explained that, since I seemed so worldly, he thou
ght I understood that I wasn’t the sort of girl he could ever marry. He thought I’d understood we were just having a bit of fun. Though of course at no point had he ever said such a thing. He was, in fact, about to become engaged to an appropriate young woman. He hoped I would wish him well.”

  It was on that last word that her nearly rote recitation finally cracked.

  For a second, Delilah couldn’t breathe.

  The whole of Angelique’s history churned in the pit of Delilah’s stomach. This. This is what men did. They did things that led to two women being penniless, frightened, and alone in a tiny pub by the docks, cast there like much-churned earth flying in the wake of a plow. Just that consequential.

  She knew not all men were monsters. But they could chart whatever course they pleased. They didn’t have to care about consequences if it didn’t suit them.

  She hadn’t words. She honored Angelique’s story with silence.

  And even as she ached with furious sympathy, some all-too-human part of her envied the sheer sweep of Angelique’s life—the illicit attractions, the thrill of hope, the budding of love, though Angelique hadn’t said as much. Whereas Delilah had been transferred from her father’s household to her husband’s like crated porcelain.

  Behind the bar, Frances had, of all things, retrieved a book and was reading it. Dot and the man by the fire snored in counterpoint.

  “Is this particular lord still alive?” Delilah asked finally.

  “Yes.”

  “That is a pity.”

  Angelique’s eyes flared in surprise. And then a smile began at one corner of her mouth and spread slowly to the other.

  Then she sighed. “And here we are. After that debacle, I stopped in to the tailor shop to see if they would have me back, and of course they wouldn’t, as I’d run out on them quite unceremoniously. So I came in here to visit Frances and have a meat pie and a good cry. Which was when Derring walked in, looking like what he was, an earl in his later years. Full of his own importance but not insufferably so. He inquired as to why I was weeping. I don’t weep anymore, mind you.”

  Delilah imagined it: Dear Dull Derring, an aging wolf chancing upon a wounded doe.

  She suppressed a shudder. She didn’t need to know more details.

  “The one building Derring owns outright is the building next to this pub—Number 11 Lovell Street. Tavistock surmised he won it in a card game. Apparently it’s mine now. Perhaps that was why he was here, in this pub, the day you met him.”

  “Interesting. He never said a word about the building. Congratulations on . . . having a possession.”

  Delilah quirked the corner of her mouth. “I am sorry for your misfortunes,” she said gently.

  Angelique gave a short nod. “And I yours.”

  The silence that followed marked an unusual mutual sympathy and détente.

  “What you said about working at the tailor . . . it reminds of how I felt when we stayed in a coaching inn once when I was a little girl—we were quite poor and trying to disguise it—but I never forgot it. People who had unusual accents, spoke different languages, from all different walks of life, all convening in this one place, in bonhomie or temper . . . I thought how lovely it would be to live there.”

  “Variety. Just the sort of thing Derring would hate,” Angelique mused.

  Delilah quirked the corner of her mouth.

  Angelique cleared her throat. “You should know that despite our arrangement, I didn’t see Derring often. Once or twice a month I’d host a dinner for his friends and their mistresses in my flat. He liked me to sparkle and flatter and flirt.”

  Never had three such lively words sounded so acid.

  “Interestingly, those were my duties as well,” Delilah said, abstractedly. Which made Angelique smile again. “Were these titled friends, or . . .”

  “Mostly titled. Some, like Tavistock, were not.”

  “Any dukes?”

  “No dukes.”

  “I could imagine the Duke of Brexford would have a mistress, given the wife he’s saddled with.”

  “The duchess? Saw her once at the theater and her eyes were so cold it near froze my liver to look into them.”

  Delilah gave a little laugh. “She hadn’t the time of day for a little bumpkin like me, the daughter of such a minor lord. She never missed an opportunity to make me feel that way, whenever our paths crossed. But she did finally succeed in stealing my cook, the envy of all the households in London.”

  A snore crackled through the air. It was Dot, whose head was tipped back, her mouth open wide. The hatpin remained still gripped in her fist. Her cap was sliding off the back of her head.

  “Now, Lady Derring, I wish to ask you a question,” Mrs. Breedlove said.

  “Very well.”

  She was quiet so long that Delilah thought perhaps she’d forgotten what she intended to say.

  When she took a breath, it became clear that Angelique was mustering nerve.

  “Do you hate me?” She said it quietly and evenly. Her chin had gone up ever so slightly.

  Delilah drew in a sharp breath.

  She knew what she ought to say. Ought. It was a bully, the oppressor, the weight, that word. What need of it did she have?

  “No.” Her voice was low and nearly wondering. “I know you’re asking because it’s the sort of thing one might expect. Granted, at first I was furious to learn about . . . well, you . . . and my pride was rather wounded . . . but none of those feelings lasted terribly long. Maybe it’s the sherry, but I can think of more reasons to like you than to hate you. Though you are a trifle bossy.”

  That last bit was definitely the sherry talking.

  Angelique’s face illuminated in bemused relief. She leaned back in her chair and Delilah saw her release a breath she seemed to have been holding.

  “Perhaps you are a saint,” Angelique mused after a moment, critically. She sounded like a dressmaker eyeing a client who’d been wearing the wrong kind of sleeve, one that didn’t suit her. And she had in mind the perfect alternative.

  Delilah leaned forward. “Oh, I wish that I were, but I fear I am not. I have simply resolved to be real and truthful when I speak and to live a real and truthful life since so much of my life has apparently been something of a mirage. And being truthful is a bit like forgoing my stays. It’s lovely.”

  Angelique gave a startled laugh.

  “Can I tell you a shecret? I mean secret.” All at once, the sherry had gotten control of her consonants.

  “I wouldn’t dream of stopping you.”

  “It’s this: I’m not an entirely pleasant person all the time.”

  “Oh, I can tell. You are as vicious as a little chipmunk. Grrrowr.”

  “Stop that right now.” Delilah clapped her hand down on the table. Both Dot and the snoring man jumped a little, opened their eyes, shut them again. “I won’t have it.”

  Angelique’s eyes widened.

  “See what I mean?” Delilah said this in a sort of gleeful wonderment. She didn’t apologize. It was just so exhilarating not to lilt.

  “I do see.” Angelique sounded as though someone had just explained a tricky mathematical equation to her, to her delight.

  “My thoughts are sometimes unkind and even, daresay, shar . . . that is, sarcastic.”

  “Never sarcastic! I believe they hung witches at Tyburn for sarcasm.”

  Delilah surprised herself by laughing.

  And Angelique laughed, too, a merry, genuine sound.

  Dot’s head jerked up off her chest and she laughed, too—“ha ha ha!”—sleepily, before nodding off again.

  Of all the peculiar things that had happened in the last several days, laughing with her late husband’s mistress scarcely a week after his funeral might have been the oddest.

  “Derring never laughed at my jokes. But I laughed at all of his, even though I didn’t find him amusing. He sulked if I didn’t,” Delilah said.

  “It’s a small but killing thing, isn’t it?”

>   “It is.”

  “He wasn’t funny at all.”

  “He really wasn’t.” Delilah felt only a twinge of disloyalty. It was the truth. She was beginning to like the truth, though, like sherry and cursing, she suspected it was probably best to be judicious in the partaking and delivery of it.

  A lull fell.

  “So what will you do now, Mrs. Breedlove?”

  “Well,” Angelique said, “I intend to finish this sherry, fill my pockets with rocks, and wade into the Thames. Oh, and do call me Angelique.”

  Delilah’s breath left her in a gust. “You don’t mean it!”

  “Oh, I’m quite serious,” Angelique said almost blithely. “I’ve had enough. I have played all of the modest hand that I’ve been dealt in life and I have played it badly, and I have lost again and again, and I am out. I am weary of the perfidy or sheer tedium of men, and I see no way to prosperity or comfort without saddling myself with one of those creatures, and I haven’t the fortitude to begin again, or the imagination to become a flower peddler, for instance, and dream of being rescued by a prince. Princes do not exist, and if they did, they certainly wouldn’t exert the effort to rescue me. Dreams are pointless. I am done. But cheers to you, Lady Derring. I wish you the best.”

  “But . . . your jewels! You can sell your jewels and live on the proceeds!”

  Was she was actually campaigning for her husband’s former mistress to sell the jewels he’d bought her?

  “If I sell them, I shall have enough to live in relative comfort for a year, perhaps two. I aspire to more than mere survival.”

  And with that, she reached for her glass of sherry.

  Delilah seized Angelique’s wrist and held it fast.

  And suddenly Delilah knew, without a doubt, that she was stronger when someone needed her. Stronger, perhaps, than this woman, who might be sophisticated and clever and jaded but who had acquired her polish the way gems in a tumbler do. Angelique might know infinitely more than Delilah did about all manner of things. But she suspected one could only be tumbled and jostled so many times before saying enough.

  Delilah had been a countess for six years, after all. She’d gotten accustomed to controlling one or two things.