Lady Derring Takes a Lover

by Julie Anne Long

  He regarded them sympathetically for a tick or so, head at a slight tilt.

  “Guests?” he queried, gently.

  For the second time today, Delilah’s cheeks heated. Part temper, part mortification.

  She held his gaze.

  “For two months,” said Mr. X. “At which point we would like to either renew or release our claim. You have our assurances that my employer knows how to behave properly.”

  There was an unusual emphasis on the word knows. As though he knew how but considered proper behavior optional.

  The man reached into his coat and opened his wallet.

  Then he clinked two sovereigns on the table. As indolently as if they were bread crumbs.

  She’d seldom hated a person more. How she longed to be able to say no and send him on his way.

  “Is your employer indeed a gentleman, sir?”

  He seemed to consider this.

  When he smiled, it was small, weary, long-suffering, and ironic.

  They waited.

  But he didn’t deign to answer the question.

  “We’d like a moment to discuss this generous but unorthodox arrangement, Mr. X,” Angelique said smoothly. Dot had just arrived with the tea. “If you would enjoy your tea we’ll rejoin you shortly.”

  “By all means,” he said. Like a judge or a king.

  Their guest took a sip of tea and raised his eyebrows in approval.

  Delilah and Angelique moved across their shiny foyer into the opposite drawing room, the one with the as-yet-unused pianoforte. It was a little chilly, because they had decided not to light a fire in this room, in order to conserve money.

  And this fact suddenly infuriated her. Once again, a supercilious man was assuming they would do whatever he wanted them to do simply because they could not say no. Because he had the money. And the money meant he had the power.

  They spoke in whispers.

  “I hate him,” Delilah said simply.

  “Me, too,” Angelique agreed.

  “It feels like a trap of some kind, but I cannot see how. What if we’ll be harboring a criminal?”

  “I don’t know. Mr. X”—Angelique rolled her eyes extravagantly—“certainly dresses with a severe splendor for a mere assistant of a criminal. I would warrant it’s someone notorious, however, which could be thrilling.”

  “First of all, we don’t want thrilling. And it can’t be thrilling if the actual Mr. E isn’t here and might never be. But what if . . .”

  Delilah didn’t finish the sentence.

  She was going to ask the questions that had no answers: What if no one else ever comes? What if we fail? What if we starve?

  “I so longed to make all of our decisions out of hope and discretion, not fear,” she said instead.

  “Well, one day we will, perhaps. I’m not certain we have a choice at the moment.” It was Angelique’s dryness that helped sober Delilah.

  “Then I suppose that’s our choice, and that makes all the difference, if we are choosing it. We’ll be equal to what comes. We’ve been equal to everything in our lives so far. And it could be an adventure.”

  “I certainly hope not,” Angelique said.

  “Then we are decided.”

  “We are decided.”

  They conveyed the good news to Mr. X, who didn’t so much as waste a muscle twitch on surprise or celebration.

  He’d left the sovereigns sitting on the table.

  Delilah would rather die than leap upon them before he took his leave of them.

  “You will know him when and if he presents the other half of this to you.”

  He extended to Delilah something the size of a sovereign, forged of metal. It appeared to be half a crest of some sort. Perhaps the leg of a lion, or a unicorn? It was difficult to tell.

  Honestly.

  “Do you dole these tokens out about the ton, Mr. . . .”

  “X,” he repeated, patiently.

  He ignored her question, patted on his hat, collected his coat, and disappeared into the night without another word.

  The Stevens Hotel’s dining room was brimful of men who were wearing, or had worn, or would wear when they were back on duty, the uniform of an English soldier. All attempting to eat a breakfast somehow striking in its flavorlessness.

  “Number 11 Lovell Street appears to be a boardinghouse,” Tristan told Massey.

  “A boardinghouse by the docks?” Massey repeated. Puzzled. “Is that another way of saying brothel?”

  “If I meant brothel, Massey, I would have said brothel. I suspect it is nothing quite so interesting anymore, even if it might have been in days of yore. Save your envy.”

  “What is it like?”

  “It appears to be very clean and it smells like a church. I saw a healthy fire in a grate in one room and there’s a little pub adjacent.”

  He looked wistful. “Sounds lovely. Just like me mum’s house.”

  Captain Hardy eyed him balefully. “Did your mum live in a former whorehouse near the docks?”

  “I hail from Dover, Captain. Me mum’s a saint.”

  A saint with eight children and a mouth on her like a sailor, Hardy knew, but did not repeat.

  “And Derring’s widow is apparently one of the proprietresses. I spoke to the barmaid at the pub adjacent.”

  Massey gave a long, low whistle. “That is interesting. A countess come down in the world of a certainty. Is she pretty?”

  Tristan regarded him quellingly. “How on earth does that signify?”

  “Pretty women can get a man to do just about anything.”

  “Not this man.”

  He had an errant thought: how pleasant it would have been if the maid on the ladder had needed him to do something for her. He feared he might have scrambled to do it.

  “No,” Massey agreed. Long experience and observation had shown him that no one could persuade Captain Hardy to do anything he didn’t want to do.

  “I did not meet the countess yesterday, Massey, nor the other proprietress, a Mrs. Angelique Breedlove. I held a brief conversation with a maid.”

  It felt somehow untruthful to summarize that encounter thusly. In the same way saying “I saw a rainbow” excluded a good deal about the actual experience. “I intend to attempt to let a room. My instincts tell me there’s something going on in that building. Wait for orders from me. I’ll tell you if and when I’m settled in there.”

  Massey stifled a sigh. He missed action. “Very well, sir. I’ll use the time to write to my sweetheart.”

  “You have a sweetheart, Massey?” he said idly.

  “Yes,” Massey told him patiently. “Her name is Emily, sir.”

  Chapter Eight

  And with Mr. X, the floodgates, such as they were, seemed to open the very next day.

  “Margaret is very shy, you see, so I do most of the speaking for both of us. She tends to whistle when she talks and it’s quite hurtful when people make fun.” Miss Jane Gardner’s watery pale eyes were pinkish at the rims.

  Margaret Gardner glanced up from between her eyelashes. She smiled, swiftly and sadly, then looked down at her lap again.

  Based on that glimpse, Margaret’s mouth was equal parts teeth and gaps.

  Delilah, sitting alongside Angelique on the opposite settee, ached for her. Miss Margaret Gardner’s eyes were small and she had a blunt nose and what appeared to be a scar beneath her ear, as though someone had lunged at her with a knife with murderous intent.

  Life had not been benign to the Gardner sisters.

  Dot had admitted the two of them into the reception room at half past nine, ten minutes ago, then roared up the stairs to the little drawing room in a pitch of excitement.

  “We’ve a pair of sisters what be lookin’ for a room! They look somewhat decent!”

  While this was not a triumphant endorsement, hope surged painfully.

  Delilah and Angelique removed their aprons, smoothed their hair and skirts—their version of donning battle armor—and headed downsta
irs.

  They found two women sitting side by side on the blue settee, looking about the room with bemused expressions.

  It was a bit difficult to quite get a sense of how old they were, but if their clothing was any indication, they’d been sealed up in a room for a decade or more, much like The Grand Palace on the Thames itself. They were swathed in shawls, probably two apiece. They were, in fact, dressed as modestly as nuns, in dark brown and dark red wool respectively, with high-rucked collars and long sleeves fitted at the wrists. They each wore a mobcap. A few gray ringlets traced Jane’s temples. Her face was long and tapered to a pointed chin.

  They didn’t resemble sisters so much as a fox and a bear in dresses.

  Delilah felt protective of them almost at once.

  “We saw your leaflet, you see, advertising your boardinghouse. We lost our previous rooms in London, you see, to a fire. We’ve a small income and wish to spend it comfortably, near the sea air and the liveliness of London, and this place sounded hospitable and comfortable. And it seems so.”

  It was like listening to a frail, whispery woodwind. As though Jane Gardner had been shouted at all of her life to stay quiet.

  “Oh, it is indeed.” Delilah found herself accidentally speaking loudly to compensate. She cleared her throat and adjusted her volume. “Particularly for women. Our guests are family here. We, in fact, ask all of our tenants to join us in the drawing room at least four nights a week, so that we all might come to know one another better. And gentlemen will be required to put a pence in a jar if they curse. We feel it is a playful way to keep things civilized. It’s one of the requirements for staying here. We’ve rules, you see.”

  They had indeed. They had printed them on little cards, which were stacked on the table behind them. “We’ve even printed them, if you’d like to review them.”

  Margaret and Jane exchanged a swift look.

  Margaret looked disconsolately down at her hands, which were squeezed into gloves that looked a little too small, and which were folded in her lap tightly.

  “Oh, we trust that your rules are fair. But Margaret is so very shy, you see, it would be a bit of a torment for her to be surrounded by . . . er, gaiety. Where she might be expected to speak.”

  “Very shy,” Margaret confided in a sad whisper. To her lap.

  “How do you feel about gaiety, Miss Jane?” Angelique asked.

  “Oh, I don’t suppose I remember, it’s been so long now.” She laughed timidly behind her knuckles.

  “Well, perhaps she can just sit quietly with all of us in the drawing room and we can enjoy her presence,” Delilah suggested. “And you may yet rediscover an appreciation for gaiety, when you hear the pianoforte played well. We are planning to hold musicales.”

  She ignored the dry look sent her way by Angelique.

  Margaret’s head shot up briefly and Delilah got a glimpse of the whites of her eyes, flared in alarm.

  “Perhaps she’ll feel free to come out of her shell when she sees that we are all friends here, and we will not tolerate anyone making fun of her whistle. We will all be patient,” Delilah continued. Sweetly but firmly.

  “You’ve come to a welcoming place for women to live,” Angelique soothed. “We will have male guests, too, but they will be held to a strict and gentlemanly code of conduct. And that also means no sneaking gentleman callers up to your rooms.”

  Delilah shot Angelique a reproving look.

  But Miss Margaret giggled softly behind her fingers. Her gloves were kid, and fine. It was rather touching to see that she had indulged herself in at least one elegant thing.

  “It all sounds lovely. We should like to share your largest room, on a low floor.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but our largest room suitable for two people has just been let.”

  The sisters went absolutely still.

  They appeared paralyzed by disappointment.

  The mutual faint creaking of stays signaled the resumption of their ribcages moving in and out with breathing.

  “We’re so sorry to disappoint you,” Delilah said warmly. “We’d be happy to show you our second-largest room, which we will make just as comfortable for you. You will be nice and snug. It’s on the floor above.”

  The silence was oddly protracted.

  “Very well.” Jane sounded a bit martyred.

  “We’ll do everything possible to make sure you’re happy here at The Grand Palace on the Thames,” Delilah soothed.

  “Oh, we’re certain you will, dear.” She smiled.

  Delilah and Angelique decided that since they had three guests now—one invisible, two visible—serving something fancy involving beef would be a splendid way to celebrate. Helga and Angelique set out to see if they could get a roast, happily squabbling about the price of it and the inventive ways they could stretch the meat throughout the week.

  Delilah fondly saw them off.

  In the spare moment here and there it occurred to her how odd it was that they’d all easily slipped into this unique way of life, when in typical circumstances their lives—hers and Angelique’s and Dot’s and Helga’s—would have been stringently partitioned from one another. What would her mother have said if she’d caught her chatting cheerily with Helga in the kitchen about her cousin in Dublin this morning? She could even now hear her hissing, One doesn’t exchange girlish confidences with the servants, Delilah!

  She was still a countess, at least in name. And it wasn’t as though a part of her didn’t feel a bit of a tug toward everything she’d been taught. But it was the sort of tug a rose must feel when trained up a trellis. The trellis had crumbled. She could grow how she pleased.

  She felt as though she was both weaving, and already woven into, this life here at The Grand Palace on the Thames. It was hers, and of her, in the way nothing else had felt in her twenty-six years. She hadn’t time to miss the luxury and leisure. Maybe one day it would seem like a sacrifice.

  Until then, she would happily sing while she did the dusting.

  Dot took the Gardner sisters up to get them settled into their room. Delilah decided she’d dust the large drawing room, paying special attention to the pianoforte just in case musically inclined guests began to pour through the door. Then she took a cup of tea to the drawing room to ostensibly finish some mending, but in truth mostly because she wished to scratch Gordon beneath the chin.

  Both she and the cat sprang apart like startled lovers when she heard Dot’s feet thundering up the stairs, all three flights. Dot was quite fit.

  “Lady Derring Lady Derring Lady Derring Lady Derring Lady Derr—”

  She leaped to her feet. “Good heavens, Dot, what is the trouble?”

  “There’s a man downstairs what wants to let a room, and . . .”

  Dot paused and pressed her lips together.

  Her face was lit up with a blend of wonderment and a sort of delicious fear, the kind engendered by horrid novels.

  “What sort of man?”

  “Very tall, not a spare ounce nor frill on ’im. His clothes fit like a skin, they’re so perfect and I could see me own face in his boots. I could not decide between Lucifer or the chap what holds up the world—”

  “Atlas?” They’d been reading that particular myth aloud to each other in the upstairs drawing room at night.

  “Aye, but summat about him is like both. I would and wouldn’t like to meet him in an alley alone, if you ken what I mean.”

  “Good heavens.”

  She most certainly did not ken what Dot meant, but she was going to have to go downstairs and face this remarkable person alone, with just Dot for reinforcements.

  She untied her apron, shook out her skirts, reviewed her reflection for respectability. Huge, too-hopeful brown eyes gazed back at her. She was growing weary of mauve half mourning but at least the color suited her. She tried on a cooler expression, something like welcoming hauteur, and followed Dot downstairs to the reception room.

  The man turned slowly at the sound
of her footsteps across the foyer.

  But even before she saw his face she knew. Because she felt him. His very presence was as distinct a sensation as velvet, or flame. And her heart lurched in both alarming untoward exultation and fear.

  She stopped short on the threshold of the room as though the carefully chosen and trimmed carpet was instead lava.

  He lifted his head.

  His abrupt stillness thrilled her. As though he’d braced for impact, too.

  “I noticed the windows are very clean,” he said gravely. Finally. And after a long moment during which no one said a thing.

  He hadn’t yet blinked.

  “La la la la,” he added. As solemnly as one might deliver a speech in parliament.

  Her usual responses to things were in a snarl, as bound tightly together as Margaret Gardner’s shy, folded hands. She was suddenly acutely aware of how her shift felt against her skin. All of her senses, in fact, were suddenly, painfully alert. As if they’d finally found something truly worthy of their attention and had been lying down on the job for the first two decades of her life.

  “Is Lady Derring indisposed then?” he said gently. As though he was both resigned to her being witless and quite accustomed to being gawked at. “Shall I speak with you instead?”

  “I am Lady Derring.” Her voice was even, if thready.

  Instantly a cool, hard screen of a sort moved over his expression.

  She could see at once that he was making an internal adjustment, a reassessment of some sort, and it wasn’t a flattering one.

  It occurred to her all at once that she would not want to play cards with this man.

  He bowed, gracefully as any courtier.

  “Well, then. A pleasure to meet you, Lady Derring. I am Captain Tristan Hardy.”

  The name was a bit of a surprise. But it fit him, all of it. Tristan, with its air of implied heroism and tragedy, and Hardy, because anything with “hard” in it would suit. As Dot had said, not a spare anything on the man. One got the sense bullets would bounce right off.