“Oh, I suspect you’re being modest, Hardy.”
“No one who knows me would ever suggest that.”
While this was true, Delacorte laughed heartily for no reason Tristan could surmise.
There was a lull, during which Tristan thought he could begin making inquiries, though it was difficult to imagine Delacorte as a smuggler, roaring away about cigars in a black boat slinking up the coast, or nimbly leaping ashore with purloined goods. There was nothing of subtlety in the man. He’d be hung with alacrity in no time if he were a smuggler.
“Hardy!” Delacorte whisper-barked behind his hand, pantomiming secrecy, even though they were completely alone. “Have one of these.”
He slipped his hand into his coat and withdrew, of all things . . .
. . . two cigars.
He wagged his eyebrows at Tristan by way of encouragement.
Tristan stared at them.
Slowly, wordlessly, Tristan accepted one.
Ran it beneath his nose.
The little hairs on the back of his neck prickled.
“You’ll love it, Hardy,” Delacorte enthused. “They taste like . . . a damp house made of chocolate and perhaps parsley or sage, in which two zebras have been fucking on a dirt floor.”
Tristan stared at him.
It might be the most profane thing he’d ever heard.
And he’d been a sailor.
But Delacorte had lit it and he was studying it pensively, even beatifically, as smoke wreathed him, his brow wrinkled a bit.
“No—lions fucking,” he amended, cheerfully. Satisfied with that conclusion, he sucked until the tip glowed. “And yet, it’s delicious, somehow. Most interesting thing I’ve ever smoked.”
This was why women wanted to segregate the men for a time. One just never knew what they were going to say or do. For the same reasons one oughtn’t to keep an ocelot for a pet. He’d heard of a French aristocrat who had tried that once. It had humped the family dog and eaten the cat.
And they were bound to talk about all the things they’d smoked, eventually, because men had those kinds of conversations.
“I must regretfully decline at the moment, Delacorte, but thank you. Where did you get these singular cigars?”
“Bought them at the apothecary up the road on Courtland Street a month ago. Said they’d get more in but never did. Now they’re selling them for ten pounds each. Ten pounds! I ask you.” He shook his head mournfully. “Who has that sort of money to spend on cigars?”
“Did the apothecary say from whom they’d purchased the cigars?”
“Didn’t ask, my good man. Was selling him exotic concoctions and I didn’t want to remind him of another vendor at that delicate juncture.”
“I understand.” He made a note to tell Massey to pay a visit to that apothecary.
“So what else have you smoked, Delacorte?”
“Oh, opium, just the once, just to see. I like my head clear, you see. All manner of herbs. As one does in my line of business. Testing the wares. I smoke nothing with any regularity, mind you, and thank goodness for that. Weakens the mind. And other things, too, if you take my meaning!” He winked heartily.
“I take it.” At no point in the history of the world would someone be unable to take Delacorte’s meaning.
“What manner of business are you in, Delacorte?”
“I sell bits and medicinal bobs of herbs and treatments imported from all over the world to apothecaries and surgeons. Crushed test—er, parts of various exotic animals, some very potent herbs. Was me own idea, you see. Took a treatment in China once, worked a charm!”
It was just inside of legal, barely, Delacorte’s profession, but doctors and surgeons, as far as Tristan was concerned, often operated on a wing and a prayer half the time, anyhow, and he knew from experience that some Chinese herbs and the like were quite effective in healing or easing pain.
“Make a good living?”
Men could ask this sort of thing of other men, casually, over cigars.
“Oh, fair bit. Fair bit. I can afford the rates here at The Grand Palace on the Thames, and so far I believe I’ve made a good choice. The company is fine,” he said gallantly.
“I suppose it’s fortunate there’s no cursing jar in this particular room.”
“Ha ha oh ho, the jar!” He gave Tristan a friendly whump on the back and Tristan clamped his top and bottom molars together to keep from reflexively clipping Delacorte about the ears. “You see, Hardy, I don’t mind a rule or two. Keeps a man civilized, wouldn’t you say? They know we’re all heathens at heart, even Brummell, I’d warrant. I’d love a woman of my own to bellow at me ‘Stanton, knock the mud off your boots before you come in the house or I’ll take a rolling pin to ye!’ Wouldn’t you?”
“I can’t say that I’ve ever yearned for a woman to bellow at me, no.”
“Used to being the one giving the orders, eh?” Delacorte winked.
After a moment he said, “Yes.”
The tone and nature of this yes caused a little stutter in Delacorte’s determined bonhomie.
He smiled at him a little uncertainly.
Tristan stifled a sigh. Part of the difficulty, Tristan realized, was that he for the most part was exposed to one kind of man, who treated him one kind of way: as though he were the ultimate authority. All he did was give orders.
He didn’t need anything from Delacorte, unless it was information. And what did that say about him as a person if he couldn’t speak to someone unless they were of use to him?
“May I keep this?” he said, more pleasantly. Gesturing with the cigar.
“Certainly, certainly. Enjoy it later when the mood for vice is upon you.” Another wink.
Ten pounds, this foul, exotic cigar. Tristan contemplated again the value people placed on things. That smugglers would be willing to risk their lives and the lives of others to avoid paying taxes on something like a cigar, or silk, or tea. That such things acquired arbitrary value. That someone’s entire family had died, perhaps accidentally, but nevertheless, an ugly death, so that some aristocrat or adventure seeker somewhere could say he spent ten pounds on a disgusting cigar.
“So what brings you to The Palace of . . . The Grand Palace on the Thames, Mr. Delacorte?”
“I found an advertisement at the apothecary. It sounded like a lovely, orderly feminine sort of place.”
“And yet you came here anyway.”
“Ha ha!” Delacorte was surprised and delighted by the joke.
“Do you like your room? I asked for the largest suite, and was told it was taken.”
“I was told it was taken, too. I believe the Gardner sisters have the second largest.”
“I gather we haven’t yet met the person fortunate enough to have let the largest suite.”
“I suppose not,” Delacorte said with equanimity, entirely untroubled by this.
Tristan kept the obvious question to himself, which was: If we’re all required to gather in the drawing room, why is the tenant of the large suite exempt? He would find out soon enough.
A little silence fell.
“So. Got a sweetheart, Hardy? A wife? Perhaps on a distant shore?”
“I am unmarried.”
“I’ll wager it’s difficult for an old sea dog like you to settle down. You ought to get yourself one. A woman. Fine respectable bloke like yourself.”
“I shall give your advice due consideration, thank you.”
“Harder for a chap like me to find just the right one, you see.”
He didn’t expound, but neither did Tristan disagree.
Nor did he tell him what he thought: that it was equally hard for a chap like him, who didn’t fit precisely into any defined social strata. A chap whose ways had perhaps calcified. A chap who had learned to trust no one completely, because he’d learned that people would do just about anything, and when someone did not precisely fit a niche people became uneasy. It had, in part, been the downfall of his very first courtship.
He half hoped he’d get to see their faces when Delacorte trotted out those nicknames in mixed company, which seemed inevitable.
“They seem to have created a comfortable place here,” he allowed, cautiously.
“Well, just between you and me . . .”
He lowered his voice, and Tristan braced himself for another startling profane assessment, or perhaps a thrilling revelation.
“I think they’re ladies through and through. Too good for the likes of you and me! Ha ha ha!”
Tristan leaned back a little too late to avoid getting a moist “Ha!” in his ear.
“Just look at what they did! Sewed my buttons on as good as if they were stitched on there with steel.”
He gave a mighty tug on his waistcoat buttons, which were indeed taxed, and his face was luminous with the miracle of it. “Didn’t come off in my hand!” he marveled, with awed sincerity. He strummed a hand down them, as though they were an accordion. “They said they’d help give me hair a trim, too. I can sew a button, mind you, but there’s just something about a woman’s touch.”
Tristan was oddly, ever-so-slightly, very surprisingly, moved. And pleased for him.
“Congratulations, Delacorte. That’s a fine thing.”
He supposed it sometimes was the small things like buttons that would keep your waistcoat closed that made the world feel secure and like a gentler place, a place in which people cared enough about you to make sure you weren’t bursting through your clothes. Just as the smallest tasks on a ship—ensuring bolts were tightened and wood was cleaned and waxed and oiled and sails were neatly mended—were the ones that made it possible for him to bring criminals to justice in the name of the English empire.
It was the first time he’d considered that strength was only allowed to exist by virtue of something like gentleness.
Vividly now, he suddenly recalled Lady Derring’s face as he’d left the room with Delacorte: a sense of mischief—which he now understood more thoroughly—and a sort of hope. He suspected she was trying to create something in particular here at The Grand Palace on the Thames.
But why?
And at what cost, if she were abetting a smuggler?
If she was a smuggler? It was very difficult to imagine a woman who had those soft eyes, and whose emotions moved across her face so easily, engaging in something so nefarious and sordid.
She had an epithet jar, for God’s sake.
But desperate people do desperate things.
He recalled, with a pang, that flare of hunger in her eyes when she’d seen those twelve pounds.
“Hasn’t been easy for me to find a wife or a sweetheart,” Delacorte said. “I’m an old-fashioned sort. I know I’m a bit much to take. Got loud from having only meself to talk to when I’m on the road, I suppose. Drown out the silence. I expect you got a bit quiet from the noise of sailors, eh?”
It wasn’t an insight he expected from a loud, gassy salesman of dubious medicines. No one accused him of being quiet, which he doubtless was; no one troubled to wonder why he’d gotten that way, not even himself, not really.
It was a little irritating to be inspected thusly.
But he liked it, too, perversely. It was a bit like looking out of a heretofore undiscovered window in a room. A different angle on a familiar view.
“I suspect I’ve gotten more economical in speech as the years have gone by. You learn what’s worth commenting on.”
“I might have gotten a bit more loquacious from years of being alone, but if I’d a wife to sit by the fire with, perhaps we’d be cozy and quiet together.”
“Bit hard to picture you quiet, Delacorte.” He said it lightly.
“Ha ha ha!” Delacorte was delighted to be teased.
Tristan, in spite of himself, smiled.
And made a note to have Lieutenant Massey speak to the apothecary to check out Delacorte’s story.
When he emerged from the smoking den for air, he’d found that the ladies had all exited the drawing room for the evening. The fire had burned low, the lamps were doused. In this soft light, the furniture didn’t look worn or tawdry; it was easy to imagine that the sag and fray of the settee had been put there by generations of shifting bums of a reading, sewing, laughing, cuddling family.
And it reflected the current occupants of The Grand Palace on the Thames: nothing quite matched. And yet, because of that, it did match.
A paradox of sorts.
An errant, unwelcome thought flitted through his mind: if he ever had a home of his own . . . he wouldn’t mind if it looked like this.
He would never say this out loud to sentimental Massey.
But why had Derring owned this building?
And if his widow was wallowing in contraband cigar money, shouldn’t there be a little gilt or ormolu about?
Maybe it was all upstairs, where the proprietresses kept their rooms.
He could hear the maids at work down below in the kitchen still, laughing and calling to each other.
Unhappy employees, especially scullery maids, don’t laugh while they work.
But it meant he couldn’t “accidentally” meander down there and wander about freely exploring. Not just yet.
And as he climbed the stairs to his room, he thought he could hear feminine laughter above, like distant birdsong. Something about it tugged at him nostalgically, though it wasn’t a part of any memories he’d had of his life.
As he scaled the stairs he tested each one for squeaks and groans, and made a note of it. Because he’d be coming back down this way in a few hours, after everyone was asleep.
In his room, he got his boots off, hung up his coat in the little wardrobe, stuffed a tiny wad of cotton batting in his keyhole, stretched out on his blue counterpane, and listened to the house.
There were light, swift footsteps overhead; the floor creaking and sighing as women moved across it, rocked in chairs, perhaps.
Something landed on the floor with a small thump. A book perhaps.
There was a muffled shout of feminine laughter.
At last the creaking and moving about ceased.
It was odd how different a sleeping house felt from a wakeful one. Houses were as alive as people, in some ways.
He heard the tiny thunder of an animal of some kind racing down the hallway. Probably a cat. Or a terrifyingly enormous rat.
He frowned, puzzled, when he became aware of a low rumble, like a crouched animal nearby, growling. He gripped his counterpane in shock as the sound swelled and swelled into what sounded like the slow, painful rending in two of a giant tree.
It dropped abruptly.
It was followed by a lengthy, mighty snort, like some creature inhaling the contents of a room.
Dear God above.
It was Delacorte.
Snoring.
Right below his room.
Well, at least he’d have the cover of noise when he did what he was about to do.
At half past midnight he pulled on his black coat, pocketed a flint and a candle, and slipped out of his room.
He knew where and how to place his feet on the stairs to keep them from creaking to get from one landing to the next.
All the sconces had been snuffed and curtains drawn in the halls. There was a half-moon behind clouds out there, shining through an exposed alcove window, but it did little more than turn the shadows a slightly lighter shade of black. He felt his way along the wall toward the mysterious room number three.
He froze.
Something disturbed the dark. At first he could feel it more than hear it.
But then he did hear it: breathing. Audible, but only just.
Accompanied by footsteps. Slow, deliberate. Someone was attempting to be stealthy. They were only partly succeeding.
It was Miss Margaret Gardner, who hadn’t a prayer of being unobtrusive, even under cover of shadow.
Had she been in Delacorte’s
room?
But Delacorte was already snoring.
And then Miss Margaret scaled the stairs, doing a fairly decent job of avoiding squeaks.
If she was on an innocent journey through the house, she would have brought a candle with her, he thought. As it was, she was just a bulky shadow disappearing around the corner.
He paused and waited. What on earth was she doing?
And what if she chose to return to this floor?
He didn’t want to be caught on his knees peering through a keyhole in the dark. So a few moments later, he returned to his room up the stairs as stealthily as he’d gone down them.
Chapter Eleven
The following evening at The Grand Palace on the Thames was quiet. Delacorte had gone happily to a boxing match, the notion of which made the ladies wince; Captain Hardy had offered no explanation about where he was heading in the rain when he bid them good evening after dinner, crammed on his hat, and departed on a swift, long-legged stride. “A bit of business to take care of,” he’d told them.
Dinner was delicious, of course—a lovely stew of beef and vegetables, some potatoes, good bread, a tart—but the scattered attempts at niceties dwindled as one by one, everyone paused to watch, riveted, Margaret Gardner’s evident enjoyment of her food. She plunged in like a retriever offered a bowl of meat. Her fork and knife a blur as she used them more like spades than utensils.
Her sister seemed better able to calibrate her eating. She calmly, and with evident pleasure, ate her stew, mopped it with bread, dabbed her lips with a napkin. And appeared not to notice anything amiss.
Delilah stifled a sigh. The Gardner sisters were not everything she’d dreamed when she envisioned a houseful of guests, gathered in warm camaraderie around the dinner table. Then again, they were only at the beginning of things here. Perhaps they needed to be nurtured, guided a little, like Delacorte. Certainly between her and Angelique they could refine the devil out of them, if given an opportunity.
But she remained wistful when she retreated to the upstairs drawing room with Angelique, leaving the cleaning up to the maids and to Dot. She listened to the rain fall hard as she knitted another row of what would be a nice warm blanket that she hoped, one day, would wrap a guest.
Lady Derring Takes a Lover Page 11
