The Wicked Games of a Gentleman, page 12
“Good afternoon, my lords,” he said through his nose, sketching a stiff-arsed bow. “Please come in. The mistress is not home. May I personally attend to your needs?”
“I’m looking for a man,” Drake said without preamble.
The butler’s eyebrows flew toward the ceiling. “A man, my lord?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Perhaps you might visit Mrs. Rutherford’s establishment by the Strand. I understand she caters to a variety of appetites.”
“I don’t want this man for pleasure,” Drake said in annoyance. “I want to kill him. He has given me offense of a confidential nature.”
“And you believe he may be in our house?” The butler’s nostrils quivered in indignation. “Describe the miscreant to me, my lord.”
“I only caught a glimpse of him,” Drake said. “Tall. Well built. He had a cheeky monkey’s face.”
“A monkey’s face,” the butler said with a frown. “I can think of several men who fit that description.”
“But has anyone like that arrived here in the past hour?” Devon asked.
“I shall ask Mrs. Watson’s personal attendants. Please make yourselves at ease while I inquire.”
“He may have entered by the back passage,” Devon called after him.
“And he may have gone out that way, too, while we stand here chatting like schoolgirls,” Drake said, striding impatiently through the lower hallway. “Come on, Miss Muffet. Upstairs.”
He and Devon separated to make a quick search of the private upstairs salon. Only two visitors were present, one a popular Drury Lane actress in an emerald silk gown, who sat sipping champagne, the other a respected member of parliament who nodded cordially upon recognizing the Boscastle brothers.
“On to the rooms,” Drake said. He was aware that enough time had elapsed for his quarry to sail halfway to Cornwall. Why had Eloise tried to stop him, anyway? That moment of distraction had cost him the chase.
Devon put his hands on his hips. “Look, we don’t know that he came in here.”
Drake didn’t spare him a look. “He might be hiding in one of the rooms.”
Devon straightened his athletic frame in alarm as Drake cut toward the private hallway. “You can’t very well go knocking on doors while people are doing the dirty.”
“You have a point,” Drake muttered. “We won’t knock.”
“He might have gone to the house down the street.”
“He might have. Except that I have a hunch about him, Devon.”
Devon followed him down the corridor. “I don’t think you or Heath have ever had a false hunch.”
“I’ll start at the right.”
Devon shook his head in resignation. “Just remember to duck when objects start flying.”
Drake flashed him a grin. Damn, but he didn’t know what he’d do without the young bastard. “With any luck the only missiles they’ll have time to throw are pillows.”
“Nobody makes a fool of Maribella St. Ives.” A volley of tasseled pillows flew across the room like a meteor shower. “Do you mean to tell me that I’m being jilted for a mere companion?”
Albert dug his hands into his pockets and gazed down gloomily from the hotel window into the street. He was sure he’d lost Boscastle, but, God, what a chase. He’d never run so far and so fast in his life. He shuddered inwardly. “He looked bloody fit to kill me.”
“I’ll kill him,” she said, her gray eyes smoldering. “What sort of game does he think he’s playing?”
“Hold still, madam,” the young maid on the floor cried in frustration. “You’ve sloshed rose water all over your lovely carpet. If you want to be beautified, you can’t be dancing your feet like a racehorse.”
She lifted one delicately arched foot into the air and swore. “What is this companion’s name?”
“Damned if I know,” Albert replied, hunching his shoulders. “The house is leased to a Lord Horace Thornton. He and his sister live there, but I gather he’s gone off to evade his debtors.”
“Never heard of either of ’em.” She frowned down at the exasperated maid on the floor. “Are you sure Lord Drake didn’t call while I was asleep?”
“Yes, I’m sure, Miss St. Ives,” the maid replied for at least the tenth time that day. “He sent an apology claiming that he’d been delayed again.”
“Delayed. He’s been delaying, all right. How horrifically insulting. Dallying with a—a virtual domestic while I sit here all alone.”
Albert frowned at her. “There’s an earl and two other titled gentlemen waiting downstairs for you to appear.”
“The Earl of Chesleigh?” Her face cleared. “Did he come bearing more gifts?”
“You’d have to ask him yourself. I’m only supposed to be a bodyguard.” He frowned at her over his shoulder. “Boscastle’s going to kill me if he ever sees me again.”
“I told you not to let him see you,” she said, picking up a copy of a Parisian magazine.
“I was well enough hidden. I swear he has the instincts of a wolf.”
“So I understand,” she said a little sourly. A reluctant smile curved her red lips. “A lady’s companion. I wonder if that’s the same woman he had waiting in the carriage the night we met, the devil. I knew the moment I met him that we would not suit.”
“He’s worse than a devil,” Albert said, ducking the magazine she heaved in his direction. “I knocked over two elderly women escaping him and damn near castrated myself scaling a wrought-iron gate.”
She looked distinctly unconcerned. “Do you remember where this woman lives?”
He grunted. “Of course I remember. I’m not going back there, though.”
“No.” She dipped her toes back daintily into the bowl of scented water. “But I might.”
Two hours later, as Eloise was sitting down to tea and a healthy serving of almond trifle with Heston and Mrs. Barnes, a note arrived from Lord Drake warning her that he hadn’t caught the culprit in the garden, but that everyone in the house should be on guard in case he appeared again. Eloise was relieved he had not been injured in his wild pursuit. Who had been watching them? Not Ralph Hawkins. Was it too much to hope that he had disappeared?
“Goodness,” Mrs. Barnes exclaimed, putting down her spoon, “we have a champion in Lord Drake. A protector.”
Then she looked frankly at Eloise, who resumed digging into her trifle as if she had no idea what the woman meant, although it was obvious that Mrs. Barnes understood exactly why Lord Drake had been paying Eloise so much attention. What wasn’t obvious was how Eloise would handle the situation. Her heart wanted to accept his offer. Her mind warned her that to abandon her principles could only bring unhappiness. She had always hoped that one day she would marry, but could she let him go?
She was still pondering her options three hours later when a footman arrived at the house and, in front of Mrs. Barnes, Thalia, and Freddie, presented her with a letter on expensive vellum along with a bouquet of long-stemmed hothouse lilies. Eloise was delighted enough with the flowers, but was rendered speechless when she realized that entwined in their white silk ribbon was a necklace of baroque pearls.
The letter read simply:
I knocked over enough flower carts today to fill a meadow.
I’ll give you time to think.
Let me know the moment you decide.
But decide soon.
Drake
“What’s it say?” Freddie asked, staring over her shoulder.
She pressed the letter to her heart. “Er, nothing. Not much. His lordship knocked over several flower carts while pursuing that intruder today.”
Mrs. Barnes cleared her throat. “He didn’t knock over a jeweler’s shop, did he?”
“Pearls from Drake Boscastle,” Thalia said softly, coming up behind her. “How perfectly wicked. Do you realize how many women I know would be envious? He must be infatuated. Oh, Eloise, what are you going to do?”
Eloise shook her head. “What should I do?”
“Put them on.” Not caught up in herself for once, Thalia lifted the necklace to Eloise’s throat. “It doesn’t hurt to see what they look like, does it?”
Eloise almost smiled. Since Thalia’s return, she seemed to have changed in subtle ways. Eloise could only hope the girl had learned from her experience. But what of herself? For all she had struggled, she was not sure what lessons to draw from her own life.
“What luster they have!” Thalia exclaimed. “How well they look against your skin.”
“How impractical,” she murmured. “Putting on pearls to go to bed. As if anyone could admire them.”
But several minutes later, after everyone had retired for the night, she sneaked back into the hallway and tried on the necklace. She studied herself in the cracked mirror that hung on the wall. She did look quite nice in pearls. Not common. Almost fashionable if she pinned up her hair and changed her serviceable brown muslin for silk. A fashionable impure. That was what she would be called. She wondered whether she would come to not care.
“A mistress or a schoolmistress?” she mused aloud. “Practical or pampered? What will Eloise decide?”
“She’s a fool if she lets a gentleman like Lord Drake get away,” Mrs. Barnes said from the door to the parlor.
Eloise spun around, blushing in embarrassment. She suspected that Mrs. Barnes had taken to tippling Lord Thornton’s brandy before bed, and drinking lowered her inhibitions. Well, Eloise had been known to take a few sips herself here and there after a trying day.
“Of course I can’t accept the pearls,” she said. She struggled to undo the clasp, which seemed to have developed a mind of its own. She could not unfasten it. “Don’t stand there dispensing bad advice, Mrs. Barnes. Kindly help me remove this symbol of sin and seduction from my neck.”
“Sin and seduction,” Mrs. Barnes said, breathing out brandy fumes like a drunken dragon as she came to Eloise. “I call it security and protection.”
Eloise lifted her chin. “Are you encouraging me to accept an indecent offer?”
Mrs. Barnes, normally a sorceress with her fingers, frowned when the clasp resisted her deft handling. “Indeed, I am. Better a rich man’s mistress than a poor man’s wife. Or a schoolmistress, as you said when you were talking to yourself.”
Eloise had never heard the woman speak to her so frankly. She was glad that Thalia could not hear this conversation. “Consider the shame,” she said lightly.
Mrs. Barnes snorted. The necklace remained in place. “Yes. Consider the shame should all of us end up begging in the gutter because you chose, selfishly, I might add, to become a schoolmistress when we might have been living in a palace.”
“Lord Drake does not live in a palace.”
“Close enough. Better than debtor’s gaol, at any rate. You’ve never stayed in an almshouse, my dear. I have, and it wasn’t pleasant.”
“Poverty never is.” Eloise put her hands to the back of her neck. “You did something to the clasp, didn’t you?”
“I did not.”
“It’s stuck.”
“It’s fate. Face it, Eloise Goodwin, fate is offering you a once-in-a-lifetime chance at wealth and ease.”
Not to mention love, lust, and heartbreak, Eloise thought wistfully, lowering her hands from her neck in resignation. “I shall have to go to a jeweler’s shop first thing in the morning to have this removed,” she muttered.
“You’re making a mistake,” Mrs. Barnes said, one thick white eyebrow lifted in ominous warning. “A person should heed the signs of fate.”
“A person should mind her own business!” Eloise retorted.
“It’s a sign, mark my words,” Mrs. Barnes insisted in a forceful voice.
Freddie emerged from the steps of the lower floor, rubbing his eyes. “A sign of what? The end of the world? Lord, you two are making enough racket to signify the Apocalypse. What’s the matter now?”
“I cannot remove this necklace,” Eloise said. “The clasp is stuck.”
“I’ll fetch a bottle of brandy,” Mrs. Barnes said, veering toward the parlor.
Freddie plopped down on the bottom of the stairs. “Does brandy loosen clasps?” he asked with a disinterested yawn.
“No,” Eloise said crossly. “It loosens tongues.”
But by the time the three of them had polished off the rest of the bottle and a plate of biscuits, having given up on the necklace, Eloise had graciously accepted Mrs. Barnes’s apology, if not her advice. In fact, they were all in a convivial mood as they wished one another pleasant dreams and Eloise went into the parlor to read before bed.
And no one heard the furtive knock on the front door or noticed the man who stood listening to their laughter for a long time before he melted back into the night.
Chapter Fifteen
Drake had decided to spend the evening alone. He would have liked to visit Eloise, but it was rather late, and he’d promised her he would wait for her decision. He thought he might walk to work off his restless energy. He was a large man and looked forbidding enough that even late at night he was usually left alone. In fact, he’d been assaulted only once, when he had been mistaken for his brother Heath. Even then Drake had got ten the better of his assailant.
The incident reminded him of Heath’s infamous naked caricature, and how it had stared him in the face when he’d kissed Eloise in the garden. For a moment, the memory of her flooded him with irrational need, and he wasn’t sure all of a sudden how long he could wait for her decision. He realized he had to get a firm grip on himself before he frightened her off. They barely knew each other, but he knew what he wanted. And how to get it. He didn’t consider the possibility that she would turn him down, but she might drive him mad in the in terim.
Where? Where had he seen that man in the garden be fore? At the club? A waiter there? A footman of a friend? He knew, and didn’t know. Had he been watching Drake, or Eloise?
He slowed his pace. He was only a few minutes away from his brother Grayson’s Park Lane mansion. Once one of London’s most scandalous scoundrels, Gray had recently settled down with his warm-hearted wife, Jane, and their infant son. Grayson had a calm head when it came to life and women. He’d seduced his share of them, but to this day even his past mistresses would defend him to the death.
Grayson was anything but calm when Drake arrived. In fact, the entire house was in an uproar. Servants were running up and down the stairs, brandishing cold wet compresses and bottles of expensive sherry, puppets, and poultices.
Weed, the senior footman, grabbed Drake by the shoulders as they met on the landing. Nothing upset Weed, and he had to be at his wits’ end to put his hands on a member of the family.
“Thank heavens, you’re here,” he said half-hysterically. “The marquess is in such a state.”
“Is he ill?” Drake asked, glancing up at his brother’s suite of connecting rooms.
“No, Lord Drake. It’s his son. The young lord has a fever, and we are most distressed.”
“Have you summoned a doctor?”
Weed threw up his hands. “We’ve summoned every physician in London.”
A few moments later Drake located his older brother in the nursery where enough beeswax candles to illuminate the entire West End blazed in every corner. Grayson, a tall, majestic-looking man with disheveled golden hair and bare feet, was pacing the floor in his black silk dressing robe. His infant son lay swaddled in his cradle, red-faced, pudgy, and fretful.
Grayson spun on his heels, looking for all the world like an agitated sultan. “Oh, it’s only you,” he said in disappointment as Drake closed the door. “I thought you were the godblasted physician. I shall have his periwig for making me wait. Did you see the herbalist on your way here? The apothecary?”
Drake stared at his brother in helpless surprise. He could not remember seeing Grayson this frantic, this distraught. He didn’t know what to say. Neither of them had any practical experience with children. “Where is Jane?” he asked. He thought that Grayson’s wife would take better charge of the situation than his brother. Grayson was falling apart.
Grayson bent over the cradle, staring at his son in utter bewilderment. “She’s with her parents. I’ve sent word for her to come. What should I do in the meantime? My God, what if he dies before she gets here? Don’t stand there staring. Tell me what to do.”
Drake was afraid to go to the cradle. “I have no idea what to do. The only experience I’ve had with sickness was on the battlefield. Usually fever followed a bayonet wound.”
“That’s helpful, isn’t it?” Grayson snapped. “Do you think I’d allow my son to play with a bayonet? What the hell do you want, anyway? You don’t care about anyone. Drinking, whoring, war. That’s your life, isn’t it? Do you want to die alone?”
Drake’s face remained impassive. He knew Grayson was upset, but there was enough truth in the assault to feel its sting. “Where is the nursemaid?”
“I dismissed the damned woman!”
Drake was beginning to feel a little frantic himself. He took an instinctive step toward the restless form in the cradle. He supposed that any help was better than none. “Why did you dismiss her?”
“She let my son contract a fever, that’s why! I’ll see her hanged by her damned toenails. Or her tongue. The damned woman talks too damned much anyway. If she’d been paying attention to my son instead of talking…”
“Perhaps I should see if I can hurry that physician along,” Drake said. His brother’s fear was contagious. “Don’t forget that Devon had frequent fevers as a child. And he survived to torment us all.”
Grayson looked as if he were a drowning man who had just been thrown a lifeline. “I forgot. Devon and his infernal fevers. Mama thought he was dying every time he took sick.”
Drake worked up the courage to walk over to the cradle. The plump, red-faced family heir looked like an uncomfortable little perisher but he didn’t remind Drake of any of the dying soldiers he’d attended. “You’ve got him swaddled up like a caterpillar in a cocoon!” he exclaimed.
