Lady Derring Takes a Lover

by Julie Anne Long

  A speculative furrow appeared between her own straight dark eyebrows.

  “Can you sing?”

  “Yes,” he replied, surprised and wary.

  “As it so happens, we’ve planned monthly musicales at The Grand Palace on the Thames. It’s just we haven’t anyone to sing the masculine parts. Something to keep in mind if you’re musically minded.”

  Oh, Christ. This was alarming. In his experience, when women wanted something they had a tendency to maneuvers rather than direct requests. He’d once had to extricate himself from the musical machinations of the wife of a superior officer, and it had been like fighting his way out of a fishing net. He’d prevailed, but not without injury: to his pride and her feelings.

  Besides, he had the unflattering sense this maid asked every able-bodied man that question.

  “I was actually looking for a pub,” he said. “And I thought I would inquire here, as the facade is so charming and respectable.”

  She brought her hands together in a delighted little clasp. “Oh, did you think it was charming?”

  Her face had gone radiant as the moon. And he should know: he and the moon were on intimate terms; how many nights had he navigated by it? Countless. It wasn’t a fanciful observation. It couldn’t be. He was not a fanciful man.

  He gave a short, cautious nod. It occurred to him then that her diction had more in common with a duchess than with a maid, and that she was, in fact, almost alarmingly pretty.

  He decided it was best not to ask her about Lady Derring directly. If indeed the building was the seat of a smuggling ring, subtlety would be key to learning what he needed to know. And if the drunk fellow outside was correct, no one had come in or gone out of this place. A sudden, blunt inquiry might sound alarms and send her fleeing.

  “How lovely to know The Grand Palace on the Thames’s excellence is apparent from the street.” She pronounced the name of the place like a governess correcting the French pronunciation of a young charge. “The little pub adjacent will give you a decent hot meal and treat you kindly.”

  “I suppose I’ll go then.”

  And for the instant between the time he said that and the moment she answered, he wanted her to say, “Not just yet,” and go on saying surprising things.

  “I hope you have a lovely day, sir, and thank you for visiting The Grand Palace on the Thames.”

  Well, then. He’d been briskly dismissed.

  Was there a reason this maid wanted him to leave so quickly?

  But because it amused him to do so, he turned to obey her.

  He paused in the doorway. “Perhaps a rag affixed to a pole or a mop would help with the top of the window. And perhaps it would be wise to lock the door behind me.”

  She cast a glance over her shoulder again. “Thank you, sir. I should never have worked any of that out on my own. Thank goodness a man came along.”

  He closed the door gently behind him.

  If he was not mistaken, she’d just taken the piss out of him.

  He stood motionless a moment, staring down the street. He realized he was smiling. Albeit faintly.

  “They sent you on your way, did they not?” said the man near his feet. “What did I tell you, guv? Cruel.”

  “Aye. Cruel, indeed.”

  As Tristan jammed his hat back on, he heard the door lock behind him.

  Chapter Seven

  The pub adjacent—which seemed to be called The Wolf And, Tristan noted—was composed of four tables and eight chairs, all crammed chummily together in a place as snug as any animal den. The fire burned hot but not too smokily. Likely the place had been squatting on that corner of Lovell Street for at least a century.

  Two men were having what appeared to be a profound, conspiratorial conversation over tankards of ale. Although he was aware that nearly anything seemed profound when one was drunk enough.

  Behind the plain oak bar, the barmaid was, of all things, reading a book.

  She looked up and smiled warmly.

  “Well, good morning, sir.”

  “Good morning. A half pint, if you would. How’s the light?”

  “It’s piss, I fear. We’ll do better with the next batch. You’d be better off with the dark.”

  “Thank you for your honesty.”

  He took a seat in a battered chair that wobbled a bit.

  The table before him looked pocked with knife stabs.

  “Do you get much of a crowd in here?” he asked when she brought the ale over.

  “I’m Frances, sir, but you can call me Fran. And oh, nay. I own the place outright—once belonged to me da, and his da before him—so I don’t need much of a crowd to keep it going and it suits me. Perhaps because there’s not much room to fight in here, sir. They wind up in the street straight away. More satisfying to crash about when you can knock things over and get other blokes involved, I expect.”

  It was a hilarious summary and indictment of his gender.

  “I suppose that’s true. One would think you’d get customers from the boardinghouse next door, however.”

  She hesitated.

  “One would think,” she said.

  Cagily, he thought. And, oddly, a little wistfully.

  “It is a boardinghouse, isn’t it?” He furrowed his brow innocently. “It isn’t immediately apparent from its name.”

  One of the men at the table looked over at him alertly. “Oh, ye dinna want to go in there, guv.”

  “Oh. Why is that?”

  “It’s just the word out on the street, like. To keep clear of The Palace of Rogues.” He waved an arm, indicating the street, apparently. “Not a place you want to go into.”

  “It’s called The Grand Palace on the Thames,” the barmaid said stoutly, and Captain Hardy said somewhat reflexively. After all, he’d been told the name three times, and he was not a slow learner.

  One of the men at the tables snorted. “A sheep doesna change its spots.”

  So: drunk, then, judging by that scrambled metaphor.

  “Any particular reason I ought to avoid it?” he asked them. “How long has it been open?”

  “Just heard it said, is all. You can ask nearly anyone.” He swept an arm vaguely to indicate everyone, Tristan supposed. “Was a brothel nigh on a few decades ago, or so I’ve heard. Could be anything now, could it not? They hung that sign a fortnight ago, is all I know.”

  “But it seems . . . benign.”

  Tristan thought about the leaping fire, the lemon and linseed oil, a face illuminated with a pure and unguarded pleasure. All at once he found he didn’t want to drink his ale. He felt oddly as though he’d already drunk something pleasant and a little intoxicating, and he wanted the feeling to linger.

  “It’s a lovely place,” Fran the barmaid insisted. “Was a right disaster before. Boarded up for years. Hasn’t been anything at all for over a decade, and I ought to know.”

  “Looks deceive, guv,” the man who’d mixed his metaphors about sheep and spots said morosely.

  “I suppose they sometimes do.”

  Tristan knew better than to instigate a frivolous debate here at the docks.

  But when he thought of the maid singing about her duties, he thought there was a person who was exactly who she was. He could not imagine her deceiving anyone. He slapped that thought dead as if it was a mosquito out for blood. He moved through life in a constant state of objective suspicion, of necessity.

  “A friend of mine mentioned this pub, Frances,” he called to her. “Said it had a certain quiet charm.”

  Her face lit up and he was glad he’d embellished his lie a little. “A friend of yours, guv?”

  “Happened into it by accident. Derring.”

  “The . . . Earl of Derring?”

  He would have called her expression studied neutrality. He had the sense that she was judging him ever so slightly for calling the earl his friend.

  “Rest his soul,” he said somberly.

  “Rest his soul,” she echoed rotely.

&nb
sp; “Did he introduce himself to you?”

  She looked caught.

  “No,” she admitted, after a hesitation. “But he spoke to a friend of mine. A woman. Sitting alone. A good sort of woman,” she said hurriedly. “He introduced himself to her. And she told me who he was. That’s how I know who he was.”

  “Do you know the proprietresses of the boardinghouse, Frances? Ought I take a room there?”

  “Lady Derring and Mrs. Breedlove are all that is good and kind.”

  So Lady Derring was there.

  “Thank you for your opinion, Frances,” he said gravely.

  What on earth would make a countess undertake the running of a boardinghouse? If that was indeed what she was doing?

  “I knew I was right to stop in here today, Frances.”

  He drank his dark and left a gratuity large enough to put high color in Frances’s cheeks.

  After she locked it, Delilah touched the door—only half-whimsically—to see if it was hot, the way it might be if a flame had licked all the way up to the entrance. Because the backs of her arms had furred with an odd heat and her heart was beating as though she were competing for a prize.

  Or running from something.

  She could not recall ever before meeting a man who reverberated after he was gone. She wasn’t certain it was entirely pleasant; she did not like the realization that her senses could be so easily overcome without her permission, because she didn’t like being reminded of vulnerabilities. But she was also oddly regretful, as if a stirring piece of music had been interrupted.

  She whipped off her cap and apron and dashed up the stairs, her bunch of keys jingling all the way. She was musical nearly every time she moved now, and she didn’t mind in the least. She’d sung quite a bit for no reason at all in the past few weeks.

  She found Dot hemming a curtain in the upstairs sitting room. Gordon, their striped cat, whose head was as big as a small pumpkin and body as plump as a cushion, was lounging in a basket next to Dot.

  “Dot, you need to remember to lock the door after you open it! A gentleman just strolled in and there I was on the stairs, singing like a looby in my cap and apron.”

  “Oh, my apologies, Lady Derring! But you sing very nicely, not like a looby! Was he indeed a gentleman? Did he want to stay?”

  Dot sounded wistful. They were all getting to be wistful for the days when gentlemen—people with money and manners—were thick on the ground. They had no illusions about the wonderfulness of gentlemen.

  However, they did like—and need—money.

  Because they’d been open for business for a fortnight.

  And until today, not one person had knocked on the door.

  Though, more precisely, the man with the silver eyes had simply strolled in.

  “He meant to go to the pub.”

  Dot looked crestfallen. And Dot’s blue eyes were enormous and worried like those of a forest creature at the best of times.

  “Don’t worry, Dot, it will just take a little time for word of our establishment to spread. And then you’ll see.”

  “A little time” was all they had, if time was measured in pounds and shillings.

  For the rest of the day those few minutes the man had stood in their foyer kept returning to Delilah, much like an itch she couldn’t reach. She told Angelique about him briefly that night in the small sitting room at the top of the stairs. They’d gotten into the habit of gathering there in the evenings, talking and laughing; sometimes Delilah or Angelique read aloud—they were working their way through the Greek myths, and had just gotten to poor Persephone, who was presently still stuck in Hades.

  Angelique absorbed this news silently. There were a good deal more wordless stretches between all of them as the weeks wore on and no one came to stay.

  “Perhaps if we place an advertisement in The Times,” Delilah finally said, into the silence.

  “Perhaps if we sent Dot out into the street with a bell like a town cryer,” Angelique countered tautly. “That wouldn’t cost a thing.”

  Dot’s head shot up.

  “I do like bells,” she allowed, somewhat worriedly.

  Delilah sighed. “We won’t be sending you into the street with a bell, Dot.”

  Dot began to smile.

  “Yet,” Delilah muttered, a moment later. She was only half joking.

  It was just that the fortnight of stillness was a shock after weeks of ceaseless and, quite frankly, exhilarating and triumphant activity. Together Angelique and Delilah made decisions about expenditures and aesthetics shrewdly and effortlessly; they’d done clever things with the curtains and carpets and counterpanes and so forth left in Derring’s townhouse that hadn’t been taken away by creditors. The Grand Palace sparkled.

  Such was Delilah’s confident pride and zeal in their endeavor she’d even managed to lure Helga, her old cook, away from the Countess of Brexford with the promise of absolute autonomy in the kitchen and the potential for renown far and wide, given that they expected an exotic variety of guests.

  “It’ll be so much fun, Helga! Imagine!” Delilah coaxed. The way she had coaxed Angelique.

  “The duchess pays me well, but I’m right miserable, so’s I am,” Helga admitted. “And I miss you, Lady Derring. I’ll do it!”

  And she’d given her notice and moved in at once.

  On the day they’d hung the sign (painted artfully over the old one, which said something about rogues) and dispatched Dot and the two newly hired scullery maids-of-all-work with notices to post in all the businesses nearby, they waited in breathless delight.

  Absolutely no one appeared.

  It was baffling. London fairly teemed with people coming and going. Ships and mail coaches disgorged them every day. Surely one or two of them would find their way to The Grand Palace on the Thames, if only accidentally?

  But no.

  And in the gathering tension of the quiet days, the gears of Delilah and Angelique’s partnership began to slip and scrape. Every now and then a spark would shoot—a quip emerged perhaps a little too pointed, a tone a trifle too irritable. They laughed less together as the weight of worry began to settle heavily in, the way Gordon settled into his basket. Only infinitely less cozy.

  By the time the clock struck eight they’d fallen so broodingly silent that the sudden knock at the door resounded through the house like a gong clash.

  They all froze like thieves caught in the act.

  Delilah cleared her throat. “Would you go and see who it is, Dot?” Delilah said, as though this happened every day.

  But Dot was already a blur, scrambling down the stairs.

  She and Angelique remained silently, almost comically frozen in position.

  Dot returned moments later, panting.

  “Lady Derring Mrs. Breedlove Lady Derring Mrs. Breedlove Lady Derring Mrs. Breedlove! There’s a chap downstairs! Looks full of himself and . . .” She paused, and then said on a hush, “He wants to let a room!”

  Angelique and Delilah exchanged glances. Well, then. Perhaps that silver-eyed man had been an augury of the guests to come. The first drop in a refreshing rainstorm.

  Perhaps it was him? The description certainly fit.

  At the notion, Delilah’s heart lurched in a way that stunned her.

  “Dot, will you make some tea?” Angelique said coolly.

  Delilah and Angelique shook out their skirts, removed their aprons, reviewed the mirror for any hairs that might have escaped from their pins, then followed Dot downstairs.

  In the reception room they found a man of modest scale and scrupulous neatness and plainness. His features were tidy: a short straight nose, a small thin mouth. His black hair was clipped so severely and flawlessly, surely a ruler of some sort had been employed. And his clothes were exquisitely, precisely tailored. He was a man who could fit in or disappear into the wallpaper nearly anywhere.

  He rose when they entered.

  “We would like to reserve your finest, largest suite,” he said without
preamble.

  They surreptitiously, out of the corners of their eyes, cast glances about the room.

  It was Delilah who asked it, very gently. “We?”

  In case he was merely a convincing lunatic who had wandered in off the street.

  “I represent a man who would like to remain anonymous for the time being. He is a man of some means who, for his convenience, keeps a number of suites available at all times for his use in the ton. I am his man of affairs. We will pay handsomely.”

  Of all the practical and whimsical things they had discussed regarding the running of The Grand Palace on the Thames (What if the king should stop in? Should they one day plan to keep a horse? That sort of thing.), letting a room to an invisible man had not once come up.

  A silence fell.

  Delilah began, carefully, “Well, you see, Mr. . . .”

  “You may call me Mr. X.”

  There was a protracted silence during which Delilah and Angelique carefully did not look at each other, such was the temptation to roll their eyes.

  “One would think your employer would have reserved such a splendidly mysterious name for his own use,” Angelique suggested.

  Delilah bit the inside of her lip to keep from laughing.

  “Nevertheless,” was all Mr. X said.

  “Nevertheless” was neither an explanation nor a sentence. It was, however, arrogant.

  “Perhaps his employer prefers to be called Mr. . . . E,” Delilah suggested politely.

  Angelique pressed her lips together to keep from laughing.

  “Amusing,” said Mr. X, clearly not meaning it.

  Mr. X, whoever he was, was growing impatient. “All we ask is that you keep the room in a state of preparation should he choose to use it.” That we again! “The room should remain locked and comfortably clean as though he is, in fact, occupying it, and should he wish to use it, you will be informed so that you can make other preparations accordingly.”

  “But Mr. . . .”

  Delilah couldn’t bring herself to say it.

  “X,” he prompted patiently.

  “It’s our goal to make The Grand Palace on the Thames feel like home for all of our guests, a safe and secure haven, and that means knowing who is coming and going and who is in residence. We like to conduct interviews before welcoming someone new. It’s difficult to interview an invisible guest for suitability.”