by Edith Layton
“Fancy, my love,” he said with genuine gladness, coming to meet her and fold her in his embrace.
It was at these moments, when he held her close, and she laid her cheek against his freshly shaven one, and breathed in the scent of his Parisian lotion, that all the old longings and memories came back, and she felt at peace, at home and protected, against all her hard-won wisdom, against all her real expectations.
And of course, it never lasted long. For as soon as she stepped apart from him, she congratulated him on his evident turn of luck, and he answered confidently, “Of course, my love, I never stay down too long. And I’ve Arden and Julian on my side, I swear they quite changed my luck, and things will turn round with ease. Why, I believe in a matter of weeks I’ll be hiring a companion for you. So prepare to kiss that pretty little cit good-bye, ‘Mrs. Devlin,’ for I think you’re about to lose your husband again.”
“You won’t widow me twice, Father,” she said sourly, hardening her heart and growing discouraged with him all over again, “not with the same man, it can’t be done. And it’s Mr. Lyons and the viscount I’ve come to talk to you about. For I think my pretty little cit will become Mr. Lyons’ pretty little wife long before I can take my own name back again. And he’ll have all her money from her too by then.”
“It never does to be jealous, Fancy,” her father said teasingly, waggling his finger at her, never believing a word he said, for he never believed there was a more beautiful girl on earth than his Francesca, if she’d only learn to smile again, “and it’s nonsense anyway. He could buy Mr. Deems and sell him back in an hour, he’s so well set-up, and it’s never Miss Deems he’s got on his mind—I vow, Fancy, if you’d a mind to, you could stand at my shoulder and we could take him for every last penny, for canny as he is at cards, he’d never see his hand if you were before his eyes.”
“He’s got what’s in his pockets as he stands before you, Father, and nothing else,” she raged. “I’d swear it. And he might have his mind on me, but I’m a servant now, so all he wants on me is his hands,” she cried, her voice breaking in her vexation. She didn’t dare to tell him of the insult she thought she’d received, for she believed Arden Lyons would literally never have laid a finger on a protected young female, or let his unspoken invitation be read so clearly by her either. But she remained silent about it, half-afraid that as a gentleman her father would seek satisfaction from him, and more than half-afraid that as a gamester and a self-deceiver, he would not.
“Oh, Fancy,” her father said softly, reaching for her as she pulled away from him and stood stiffly, not wanting his consolation, because she wanted it so much.
“But you’ll see,” he said, accepting rejection as he’d always done, by discounting it as an aberration that would pass—as a true gambler knew all bad runs of luck eventually would—”he’s got his eye on you, my sweet, although as I’m your papa, he’s scarcely about to admit it to me yet. But when he knows you better, he will,” he said knowingly, as confidently as he always did when he was guessing or hoping for better things.
“You’ll not tell him the truth!” she gasped, for she needed her post for as long as it lasted, and knew that for his own purposes Mr. Lyons might well use the truth to upset the lie that was keeping her in a respectable position.
“No, no,” he assured her with some embarrassment, for he could hardly tell Arden the truth until Francesca was out of the situation of paid companion. Afterward, when his fortunes had turned, it could be laughed off as a mad start—a frolic—a mere jest. Now, while he was still at low ebb, it was undeniably lowering.
Then it was time for him to dress and prepare for his night of gaming, and time for her to return to her room to undress and prepare for her night of sleep, if she was lucky. For, she decided as she made her way back to her room, it seemed that if she had an enemy, he was all the more formidable because she had no allies, and so if she wanted to preserve her honor, and protect the innocent, whether Cecily or herself, she must prepare to fight on alone. As ever.
As Cecily prepared to sleep and her companion to plot through the night, the Viscount Hazelton lounged in his friend Mr. Lyon’s room, and they discussed both young women before they went belowstairs to watch the patrons of the gaming rooms try their luck with that even more unpredictable lady. Luck herself.
“So you want to stay on then?” Julian asked.
“I’d rather, unless you’ve other notions?” his friend asked in answer.
“No, no, nothing’s afoot, except for your mad courtship of the two charmers in question. That’s amusing enough. Planning to run footraces between their bedrooms?”
“Sack races.” Arden smiled, inspecting his cravat in the glass. Neither of them had a valet at the moment, but as they’d learned to travel in danger and without trust for any but each other often enough in the past, they’d both learned to care for themselves as well as or better than any man’s man could tend to them.
“And as to that,” Arden said, “I noted you sitting quite content in your sandwich of widows this afternoon.”
“You were so busily charming the Deemses to an inch, I had to do the pretty with them,” Julian protested, “and so far as a sandwich goes, since we stay on, I might just find Mrs. Cobb to my taste. A few more questions to be sure I’m not stepping on the baron’s toes there, and I just might,” he said reflectively. “But as to Mrs. Devlin, she was too busy staring daggers at you to notice I breathed. Then after our educational tour of the cathedral, she looked at you as though you’d leapt out of a tomb. What did you do to her?”
“I looked at her,” Arden said simply.
Julian laughed. Arden shrugged; there was, after all, nothing so stale as truth.
“Your work’s cut out for you,” Julian commented. “One’s more a challenge, the other’s a surer bet, but either way, you’ll win through. I’ve absolute faith in you.”
“I’ve absolute faith in my purse,” Arden said on a half-laugh, “even with my rare beauty and charm. Neither lady is precisely for sale, of course, but as one’s on the auction block, and the other would like to eat regularly, I believe I have a chance.”
“You will never see what others see in you, will you?” Julian asked seriously, shaking his head in sad wonder.
“I see I’m not cut out to be a lover, my handsome friend, and as I don’t wish to be seen as a fool neither, I’ll remain practical, thank you. Remember Sir Toby?” he asked.
As his friend began laughing, Arden sighed. “Ah, yes, we made a few piles of ducats with that great fool, didn’t we?” he went on reminiscently. “What a pigeon ripe to be plucked they all thought he was. And indeed, what a gigantic idiotic fop he was, a shambling bear in silks and satins, clumsy and affected and foolish to the point of absurdity with his mincing steps and nice manners. I did him to a tee, didn’t I? But all the while, I confess, while I played him unerringly to both our profits, somewhere in the back of my brilliant mind I somehow believed I was only recreating that which I always feared I might be, or seem. A large man must take great pains not to be absurd. Laughter is wonderful if you want to generate it, but a killing thing if you don’t.”
As Julian, sober and disturbed, searched for words to convince his friend that he’d never seriously seen him as the simpering would-be dandy he’d impersonated now and then, Arden went on lightly, “No, no, the bard’s King Richard Crookback had the right of it, some of us weren’t…shaped for sportive tricks, nor made to court an amourous looking glass.’ Certainly we’re not made for love words and romantic passions either, we elephantine lads. But don’t fret, Julian, I know both ladies have more than a price on their heads. And know what I have to recommend me, beyond beauty, and will enjoy the challenge.”
“And you will play the villain too?” Julian asked softly.
When Arden looked at him quizzically, he said off-handedly, because as well as he knew Arden, his present honesty as well as his criminal history, there was a great deal about him even Julian did not know
, for Arden cherished his secrets and there was often a dark strain under all his laughter. So much as he wanted to trust his friend completely, and had done and would do, sometimes, as now, he wondered. For as there was still some mystery as to what Arden had once been, there was still sometimes a question in his mind as to what Arden planned to be.
“Well,” Julian said, trying to say a dark thing lightly, “seriously courting two ladies at once might create a problem if you’re entirely successful, I should think.”
“Really? In the country where I was raised, in the harem my father kept, that is, two were considered a bare minimum. Actually, as I remember, that’s how Father always kept them,” Arden mused, “bare, or in a minimum of clothing. Julian, my innocent, my discreet and friendly conscience,” he relented, laughing as he reached out to rumple his companion’s golden hair, “I know the rules.”
And as his friend relaxed and grinned at him, he added sweetly, “Even if I don’t always choose to play by them.”
5
The blond gentleman made too many of the gamesters uneasy. He distracted their ladies just by walking past them, devastated them if he as much as looked at them for a few moments, and a fellow couldn’t keep his mind on his game if he noticed his female companion expiring from desire. And so, being a basically courteous man, as well as one with little real interest in gambling beyond that which his profession now and again called for, and as he wasn’t working this evening, Julian Dylan planned to stay out of the gaming rooms entirely. Instead, he decided as he approached the anteroom and saw Arden sitting there lost in thought, he’d pass the time with his friend, who might or might not have been working, albeit on his own terms and for his own purposes.
“Done up like a dog’s breakfast,” Arden said pleasantly, eyeing Julian as he sat beside him. “What lark has our lad in mind for the night?”
“Not done up differently than most nights,” Julian protested, looking down at himself. “I bathed before I came down, instead of after, but I’m not such a stranger to soap that it should make all that difference,” he added, puzzled.
He wore his usual evening dress: black velvet jacket and black satin pantaloons, white shirt and high white neckcloth, his only touches of color the gold in his embroidered waist coat and his hair. But then, he’d only checked his glass for neatness and order and never gauged his luminosity as others did, noting how his hair dazzled, his clear fair skin glowed, and how his light gray eyes gleamed like the sun on cloudy ice.
Arden sighed.
“The boy looks as though he stepped from out of Greek myth tonight, not his bath, and he don’t take note of it,” he complained to an invisible listener at his side. “I suppose that’s the only fairness in it, because if he knew and appreciated how he looked, there’d be no bearing it,” he concluded, for all the world as though he expected his absent audience to put in a few words too.
“Oh?” Julian said. “Then I suppose it’s a case of an ill wind blowing some good, for if I’ve gotten nothing else this last week, I’ve gotten beauty sleep. A great deal of it. Acres of it,” he emphasized, “for I’ve taken Arden Lyons’ famous rest cure, don’t you know? Off to France to rusticate in a lovely country hotel, with nothing to do but indulge in nourishing foods and the light activity of touring and strolling and visiting by day, and then early to bed and early to rise to do more of the pretty with respectable ladies again the next day. No profit in it any more than there’s fascination, you understand, but it’s a sure cure for whatever ails you: Dr. Lyons’ cure for excess.”
“But as I recall, there were some early bedtimes involving less-respectable ladies in the night,” Arden said thoughtfully. “At least I think that was you that rode into Paris with me a few times to visit with some lasses who were more interested in touring you than their city. He looked a great deal like you,” he mused, “though it was so dark, mind, I couldn’t be sure. Charming fellow at any rate, never a word of complaint about boredom out of him.”
“I’m not complaining so much as I’m wondering,” Julian answered in the light tone he used when he was being the most serious. “All the world is here in France now. In Paris, France, that is. And here we remain in this admittedly pleasant but rural hotel, a week and a half has gone by, and for all the world, I can’t see what’s going on. It must be a very subtle game this time. You flatter and smile, exposing your charm and your bank statement to the point that Mrs. Deems is ready…no, anxious, to leave you alone with her pretty little Cecily, even in her bedroom, and in the dark, for the night, with three locks on the door and the key under the pillow. But you don’t declare yourself anything but charmed. And you don’t get to be alone with her neither, for every time you move heaven and earth to maneuver it and Mrs. Deems obligingly goes temporarily blind, the baron’s daughter is there between you two like a thorny hedgerow separating the straying lamb from the wayside.”
“The rest has done wonders for you,” Arden commented approvingly. “Not only do you look marvelous, but it’s brought out the latent poet in you.”
“And yet you don’t seem to mind,” Julian went on. “In fact—”
“Did you note that strategy yesterday?” Arden interrupted him to ask. “There I was, subtle as a buttertooth draper trying to convince the duchess to buy my best silk, and I’d gotten Cee-cee to come walking with me to see the deserted summerhouse by the lake. And took her little hand in mine, and strolled on like a vicar on Sunday parade, only to discover Mrs. Devlin, sitting composed, but disheveled and winded as though she’d run a footrace, already within, waiting for us. Almost as impressive as the day before in the museum, when she’d bearded us behind that statue of David, with never a blush for the naked gent she was lurking behind, as Cee-cee and I hove into sight from behind his left buttock. Or Monday, when she materialized in the carriage…in the carriage! When last time I’d looked, she was still with all of you at the castle. And yet there she was, sitting panting, yet triumphant, as I handed my unsuspecting prey up into it for the moments alone with her before the rest of you descended to interrupt my planned and imminent half-hour of rapturous despoilment of the innocent. Or so,” he said with a reminiscent grin, “one would have thought from the look of victory the widow shot at me. What an evil-minded, interfering, meddlesome witch it is,” he said, still smiling.
“So that’s it,” Julian said, laughing. “I thought so. You relieve my mind and I compliment your taste, and in that case I don’t mind the rustication at all.”
“Indeed?” Arden asked with a quirked smile.
“And since they’re all coming down tonight, to show Cee-cee her first night of real gaming—although I suspect really so that you can be alone with her someplace dark, you’ll have ample opportunity to do what you wish at last. For Roxanne says they’ve let Mrs. Devlin have the night off as well, obviously so she’ll not intrude. But she’ll be down too, since I think she’s as deep in your game as you’ve planned. I wish you luck.”
“But I don’t need it tonight. At least not here. I’m planning on disappointing both ladies tonight. I’m off to Paris. There’s a female there, you see, who plays entirely different games, ones I’m more in the mood for just now. Care to come along?—only so far as the Palais Royal, that is. She’s faithful in her fashion, my wench, but you’re enough to try a nun’s resolve tonight,” he said, rising and looking at his friend carefully before he added ruefully, “no, an entire convent’s, actually.”
“What?” Julian asked, disbelieving. “Leaving just before the final curtain?”
“Lesson number seven thousand and eight,” Arden said patiently. “When a gentleman woos a gentlewoman, you young ignorant brute, even in the final throes, he must be a model of restraint. I’m off to buy myself some restraint,” he explained, “in the confident hope that my absence builds up a little less restraint in the ladies at exactly the same time.”
“The ladies?” Julian asked whimsically. “Come, my friend, the game is up. I’ll swear it’s just one.”
Julian paused before he shrugged and answered, “No, thank you. I’ve my own plans in the matter of desires. The baron, it seems, continues to swear Roxanne is like a daughter to him, and has been hinting broad as a barn that her lively eye is, for once, fixed, and on me. I think tonight I’ll sit still long enough to see.”
“And feel, no doubt,” Arden said. “Well, be sure to give them all my love, for I’m off to try to do just that, or the nearest reasonable facsimile that I can muster, with another.”
He winked and strode out the door.
Julian was left to wonder why a man who obviously desired one woman so badly would seek to slake his desires with an inferior other one just before he won his heart’s desire. He shrugged to himself again. Arden, after all, might not actually be going to his mistress, since he was a man who rarely told the exact truth if he didn’t feel he strictly had to. And this game he was playing was a deep one, perhaps the deepest he could play, for whatever else he concealed, the largest part of him, his heart, was clearly involved in it.