Lord of Scoundrels

by Loretta Chase

  “Jess.” Bertie’s tones took on a pleading desperation. “You know she’ll show it to people and—and I’ll be mortified.”

  “Lud, what a prig you’ve got to be since you left England.”

  Bertie’s eyes threatened to burst from their sockets. “A what?”

  “A prig, dear. A prig and a prude. A regular Methodist.”

  Bertie uttered several inarticulate sounds, then turned to Dain, who had by this time given up all thoughts of leaving. He was leaning upon the jewel case, observing Bertie Trent’s sister with a brooding fascination.

  “Did you hear that, Dain?” Bertie demanded. “Did you hear what the beastly girl said?”

  “I could not fail to hear,” said Dain. “I was listening attentively.”

  “Me!” Bertie jammed his thumb into his chest. “A prig.”

  “Indeed, it’s thoroughly shocking. I shall be obliged to cut your acquaintance. I cannot allow myself to be corrupted by virtuous companions.”

  “But, Dain, I—”

  “Your friend is right, dear,” said Miss Trent. “If word of this gets out, he cannot risk being seen with you. His reputation will be ruined.”

  “Ah, you are familiar with my reputation, are you, Miss Trent?” Dain enquired.

  “Oh, yes. You are the wickedest man who ever lived. And you eat small children for breakfast, their nannies tell them, if they are naughty.”

  “But you are not in the least alarmed.”

  “It is not breakfast time, and I am hardly a small child. Though I can see how, given your lofty vantage point, you might mistake me for one.”

  Lord Dain eyed her up and down. “No, I don’t think I should make that mistake.”

  “I should say not, after listening to her scold and insult a chap,” said Bertie.

  “On the other hand, Miss Trent,” Dain went on just as though Bertie did not exist—which, in a properly regulated world, he wouldn’t—“if you are naughty, I might be tempted to—”

  “Qu’est-ce que c’est, Champtois?” Miss Trent asked. She moved down the counter to the tray of goods Dain had been looking over when the pair had entered.

  “Rien, rien.” Champtois set his hand protectively over the tray. He glanced nervously at Dain. “Pas intéressante.”

  She looked in the same direction. “Your purchase, my lord?”

  “Not a bit of it,” said Dain. “I was, for a moment, intrigued by the silver inkstand, which, as you will ascertain, is about the only item there worth a second glance.”

  It was not the inkstand she took up and applied her magnifying glass to, however, but the small dirt-encrusted picture with the thick, mildewed frame.

  “A portrait of a woman, it seems to be,” she said.

  Dain came away from the jewel case and joined her at the counter. “Ah, yes, Champtois claimed it was human. You will soil your gloves, Miss Trent.”

  Bertie, too, approached, sulking. “Smells like I don’t know what.” He made a face.

  “Because it’s rotting,” said Dain.

  “That’s because it’s rather old,” said Miss Trent.

  “Rather been lying in a gutter for about a decade,” said Dain.

  “She has an interesting expression,” Miss Trent told Champtois in French. “I cannot decide whether it’s sad or happy. What do you want for it?”

  “Quarante sous.”

  She put it down.

  “Trente-et-cinq,” he said.

  She laughed.

  Champtois told her he’d paid thirty sous for it himself. He could not sell it for less.

  She gave him a pitying look.

  Tears filled his eyes. “Trente, mademoiselle.”

  In that case, she told him, she would have only the watch.

  In the end, she paid ten sous for the filthy, foul-smelling thing, and if she’d dragged negotiations out much longer, Dain thought, Champtois would have ended by paying her to take it.

  Dain had never before seen the hard-nosed Champtois reduced to such agony, and he couldn’t understand why. Certainly, when Miss Jessica Trent finally left the shop—taking her brother with her, thank heaven—the only agony Lord Dain experienced was a headache, which he ascribed to spending nearly an hour, sober, in Bertie Trent’s company.

  Later that evening, in a private chamber of his favorite den of iniquity, which went by the innocent name of Vingt-Huit, Lord Dain regaled his companions with a description of the farce, as he called it.

  “Ten sous?” Roland Vawtry said, laughing. “Trent’s sister talked Champtois down from forty to ten? By gad, I wish I’d been there.”

  “Well, it’s plain now what happened, isn’t it?” said Malcolm Goodridge. “She was born first. Since she got all the intelligence, there wasn’t a crumb left for Trent.”

  “Did she get all the looks, too?” Francis Beaumont asked as he refilled Dain’s wineglass.

  “I could not detect the smallest resemblance in coloring, features, or physique.” Dain sipped his wine.

  “That’s all?” Beaumont asked. “Are you going to leave us in suspense? What does she look like?”

  Dain shrugged. “Black hair, grey eyes. Something near five and a half feet, and between seven and eight stone.”

  “Weighed her, did you?” Goodridge asked, grinning. “Would you say the seven to eight stone was well distributed?”

  “How the devil should I know? How could anyone know, with all those corsets and bustles and whatever else females stuff and strap themselves into? It’s all tricks and lies, isn’t it, until they’re naked.” He smiled. “Then it’s other kinds of lies.”

  “Women do not lie, my lord Dain,” came a faintly accented voice from the door. “It merely seems so because they exist in another reality.” The Comte d’Esmond entered, and gently closed the door behind him.

  Though he acknowledged Esmond with a careless nod, Dain was very glad to see him. Beaumont had a sly way of getting out of people precisely what they least wished to reveal. Though Dain was up to his tricks, he resented the concentration needed to deflect the cur.

  With Esmond present, Beaumont would not be able to attend to anyone else. Even Dain found the count distracting at times, albeit not for the same reasons. Esmond was about as beautiful as a man could be without looking remotely like a woman. He was slim, blond, and blue-eyed, with the face of an angel.

  When he’d first introduced them a week earlier, Beaumont had laughingly suggested they ask his wife, who was an artist, to paint them together. “She could title it ‘Heaven and Hell,’” he’d said.

  Beaumont wanted Esmond very badly. Esmond wanted Beaumont’s wife. And she didn’t want anybody.

  Dain found the situation deliciously amusing.

  “You’re just in time, Esmond,” said Goodridge. “Dain had an adventure today. There is a young lady newly arrived in Paris—and of all things, it’s Dain she runs into first. And he talked to her.”

  All the world knew Dain refused to have any dealings whatsoever with respectable women.

  “Bertie Trent’s sister,” Beaumont explained. There was a vacant chair beside him, and everyone knew who it was intended for. But Esmond wandered to Dain’s side and leaned on the back of his chair. To torment Beaumont, of course. Esmond only looked like an angel.

  “Ah, yes,” he said. “She does not at all resemble him. Obviously it is Genevieve she takes after.”

  “I might have known,” Beaumont said, refilling his own glass. “Met her already, have you? And did she take after you, Esmond?”

  “I encountered Trent and his kinswomen a short while ago at Tortoni’s,” Esmond said. “The restaurant was in an uproar. Genevieve—Lady Penbury, that is—has not been seen in Paris since the Peace of Amiens. It became very clear she had not been forgotten, although five and twenty years have passed.”

  “By Jupiter, yes!” Goodridge cried, slamming his hand upon the table. “That’s it, of course. I was so stunned by Dain’s astonishing behavior with the girl that I never made the co
nnection. Genevieve. Well, that explains it, then.”

  “Explains what?” Vawtry asked.

  Goodridge’s gaze met Dain’s. The former’s expression grew uneasy.

  “Well, naturally, you were a trifle…curious,” Goodridge said. “Genevieve’s a bit out of the common run, and if Miss Trent’s the same sort of—of anomaly, well, then, she’s rather like those things you buy from Champtois. And there she was, in the very man’s shop. Like the Trojan horse medicine case you bought last month.”

  “An odd piece, you mean,” said Dain. “Also, undoubtedly, an outrageously expensive one. Excellent analogy, Goodridge.” He raised his glass. “I could not have put it better myself.”

  “All the same,” said Beaumont, glancing from Goodridge to Dain, “I can’t believe a Parisian restaurant was in an uproar over a pair of odd females.”

  “When you meet Genevieve, you will comprehend,” said Esmond. “This is not merely a beauty, monsieur. This is la femme fatale. The men plagued them so, they could scarcely attend to their meal. Our friend, Trent, was much provoked. Fortunately for him, Mademoiselle Trent exercises great restraint upon her own charm. Otherwise, I think, there would have been bloodshed. Two such women…” He shook his head sadly. “It is too much for Frenchmen.”

  “Your countrymen have odd notions of charm,” Dain said as he filled a glass for the count and handed it to him. “All I noted was a razortongued, supercilious bluestocking of a spinster.”

  “I like clever women,” said Esmond. “So stimulating. Mais chacun à son goût. It delights me that you find her disagreeable, my lord Dain. Already there is too much competition.”

  Beaumont laughed. “Dain doesn’t compete. He barters. And there’s only one type he barters for, as we all know.”

  “I pay a whore a few coins,” said Dain. “She gives me exactly what I require. And when it’s done, it’s done. Since the world seems to be in no danger of running out of whores, why should I go to what we all know is excessive bother for the other sort?”

  “There is love,” said Esmond.

  His listeners broke into loud guffaws.

  When the noise subsided, Dain said, “There seems to be a language gap, gentlemen. Wasn’t love what I was talking about?”

  “I thought you were speaking of fornication,” Esmond said.

  “Same thing, in Dain’s Dictionary,” said Beaumont. He rose. “I think I’ll toddle downstairs to throw a few francs into that rathole called Rouge et Noir. Anyone else?”

  Vawtry and Goodridge followed him to the door.

  “Esmond?” Beaumont asked.

  “Perhaps,” said the count. “I will decide later, after I finish my wine.” He took the seat beside Dain that Vawtry had vacated.

  After the others were out of earshot, Dain said, “It’s nothing to me either way, Esmond, but I am curious. Why don’t you simply tell Beaumont he’s barking up the wrong tree?”

  Esmond smiled. “It would make no difference, I promise you. With me, he has the same problem, I think, he has with his wife.”

  Beaumont rutted with just about anything he could get his hands on. His disgusted wife had decided, some years ago, that he was to keep his hands off her. All the same, she still had her hooks in him. Beaumont was furiously possessive, and Esmond’s interest in his wife was driving him demented with jealousy. It was pathetic, Dain thought. And ludicrous.

  “One of these days, maybe I’ll understand why you waste your time on her,” Dain said. “You could have something very like Leila Beaumont, you know, for a few francs. And this is the right place to find precisely what one likes, isn’t it?”

  Esmond finished his wine. “I think, perhaps, I shall not come to this place again. It gives me…a bad feeling.” He stood up. “I think, tonight, I prefer to visit the Boulevard des Italiens.”

  He invited Dain to join him, but Dain declined. It was nearly a quarter to one, and he had a one-o’clock appointment upstairs with an Amazonian blonde named Chloe.

  Perhaps Esmond’s “bad feeling” had put Dain’s instincts on the alert, or perhaps he’d drunk less wine than usual. Whatever the reason, the marquess took careful note of his surroundings when Chloe welcomed him into the crimson-draped room.

  He discerned the peephole as he was about to pull off his coat. It was several inches below his own eye level in the middle of the wall to the left of the bed.

  He took Chloe’s hand and led her to a spot directly in front of the peephole. He told her to strip, very slowly.

  Then he moved, very quickly—out the door and into the hall, where he yanked open the door of what appeared to be a linen closet, and kicked open the door behind that. The chamber beyond was very dark, but it was also very small, and he hadn’t far to reach when he heard the man move—toward another door, apparently. But not quickly enough.

  Dain yanked him back, swung him round, and, grabbing the knot of his neckcloth, shoved him back against the wall.

  “I don’t need to see you,” Dain said, his voice dangerously low. “I can smell you, Beaumont.”

  It was not hard to recognize Beaumont at close quarters. His clothes and breath usually reeked of spirits and stale opium.

  “I’m thinking of taking up art,” Dain went on while Beaumont gasped for breath. “I’m thinking of titling my first work ‘Portrait of a Dead Man.’”

  Beaumont made a choked sound.

  Dain eased his grip a fraction. “There was a remark you wished to make, swine?”

  “Can’t…kill me…cold blood,” Beaumont gasped. “Guillotine.”

  “Quite right. Don’t want to lose my head on your filthy account, do I?”

  Releasing the neckcloth, Dain drove his right fist into Beaumont’s face, then his left into his gut. Beaumont crumpled to the floor.

  “Don’t annoy me again,” Dain said. And he left.

  At the same moment, Jessica was sitting on her grandmother’s bed. This was the first chance they’d had for an extended conversation, without Bertie fussing and fretting about. He’d departed about an hour ago for one pit of vice or another, at which point Jessica had ordered up some of his best cognac. She had just finished telling Genevieve about her encounter with Dain.

  “An animal attraction, obviously,” said Genevieve.

  With that, Jessica’s small, desperate hope—that her inner disturbances had been a feverish reaction to the effluvium emanating from the open gutter in front of Champtois’ shop—died a quick, brutal death.

  “Damn,” she said, meeting her grandmother’s twinkling silver gaze. “This is not only mortifying, but inconvenient. I am in lust with Dain. Of all times, now. Of all men, him.”

  “Not convenient, I agree. But an interesting challenge, don’t you think?”

  “The challenge is to pry Bertie loose from Dain and his circle of oafish degenerates,” Jessica said severely.

  “It would be far more profitable to pry Dain loose for yourself,” said her grandmother. “He is very wealthy, his lineage is excellent, he is young, strong, and healthy, and you feel a powerful attraction.”

  “He isn’t husband material.”

  “What I have described is perfect husband material,” said her grandmother.

  “I don’t want a husband.”

  “Jessica, no woman does who can regard men objectively. And you have always been magnificently objective. But we do not live in a utopia. If you open your shop, you will doubtless make money. Yet the family will turn their backs upon you, your social credit will sink, Society will pity you—even while they bankrupt themselves to buy your wares. And every coxcomb in London will be making indecent proposals. Yes, it shows courage to undertake such an endeavor when one is in desperate straits. But you are not desperate, my dear. I can support you well enough, if it comes to that.”

  “We’ve been over this ground time and again,” Jessica said. “You’re not Croesus, and we both have expensive tastes. Not to mention that you’ll only create more ill will in the family—while I shall seem a
great hypocrite, after insisting for years that you owe none of us a farthing, and we’re not your responsibility.”

  “You are very proud and brave, which I respect and admire, my dear.” Her grandmother leaned forward to pat Jessica’s knee. “And assuredly, you are the only one who understands me. We have always been more like sisters or very best friends than grandmama and grandchild, have we not? It is as your sister and friend that I tell you Dain is a splendid catch. I advise you to set your hooks and reel him in.”

  Jessica took a long swallow of her cognac. “This is not a trout, Genevieve. This is a great, hungry shark.”

  “Then use a harpoon.”

  Jessica shook her head.

  Genevieve sat back against the pillows and sighed. “Ah well, I shall not nag you. It is most unattractive. I shall simply hope his reaction to you was nothing like yours to him. That is a man who gets what he wants, Jessica, and if I were you, I should not want him to be the one reeling in the line.”

  Jessica suppressed a shudder. “No danger of that. He doesn’t want anything to do with ladies. According to Bertie, Dain views respectable women as a species of deadly fungus. The only reason he spoke to me was to amuse himself by trying to shock me out of my wits.”

  Genevieve chuckled. “The watch, you mean. That was a delicious birthday surprise. More delicious still was Bertie’s expression when I opened the box. I have never seen his face turn quite that shade of crimson before.”

  “Probably because you chose to open the gift in the restaurant. With the Comte d’Esmond looking on.”

  And that was most exasperating of all, Jessica thought. Why in blazes couldn’t she have fallen in lust with Esmond? He was very wealthy, too. And mind-numbingly handsome. And civilized.

  “Esmond is très amusante,” said Genevieve. “Too bad he is already taken. Something very interesting came into his beautiful eyes when he spoke of Mrs. Beaumont.”

  Genevieve had mentioned to Esmond the ten-sous picture and Jessica’s belief that it was more than it seemed. Esmond had suggested asking Mrs. Beaumont for the names of experts to clean and appraise it. He’d offered to introduce Jessica to her. They’d made an appointment for the following afternoon, when Mrs. Beaumont would be assisting at a benefit for the widow of her former art master.