But in truth, it belonged to a ghost. To Henrietta.
“Mademoiselle,” Jean-Yves said close to Cecelia’s ear. “Allow me to take Miss Phoebe to the residence to collect her things. Then you inspect your new … holdings without a care.”
“You don’t want to stay?” Genny winked at him, flashing brilliant white teeth. “A man as handsome and well turned out as you could make some money here, along with a few new friends.”
“A man as old and simple as I can only appreciate so much beauty at a time, madame, before it becomes a danger to my health.” He bowed over Genny’s hand before gathering up Phoebe’s. “Come along, ma petite bonbon. We can select your favorite things for your new room.”
Cecelia watched them go. She’d long since outgrown the name Jean-Yves christened her with the afternoon they’d met. Cecelia had been a chubby, bespectacled girl drowning her sorrows in bonbons. How lovely that another lost little girl got to enjoy the moniker, the sweets, and all the gentle masculine guidance that came with it.
Between her efforts and those of Jean-Yves, maybe Phoebe wouldn’t so much miss having parents. The idea cheered her exponentially.
“What about you, Duchess, Countess?” Genny offered. “Can I interest you in a little game of chance?”
“I think I’d like that, after our tour.” Alexandra primly tucked a stray curl the color of burnished teak beneath her wide-brimmed hat.
Francesca ignored them all, studying the place and the employees with forthright but indifferent assessment.
A rather resplendent man with a grand mustache toddled down the stairs, begging the pardon of the line of ladies. He was red-faced and sloe-eyed and nearly glowed with a besotted grin at them all as he accepted his hat and coat from a footman and whistled his merry way out the door.
“Was that…?” Alexandra stared after him as a coach trundled up the circular drive.
“It couldn’t be…” Francesca gaped.
Cecelia took her spectacles from her nose to shine on her sleeve, replacing them to search for a royal seal on the carriage.
Genny placed a finger under Cecelia’s chin, urging her mouth shut. “He’s not first in line to the throne or anything … and at the rate he’s goin’, his mother will outlive him.”
When none of the Red Rogues seemed inclined to recover from a royal sighting, Genny said, “We keep a few bedrooms upstairs in case people are disinclined to go home in a state of inebriation.” She linked her arm through Cecelia’s and tugged her past the staircase, where a lady she recognized as Lilly drifted down, lacing a white bodice with pink ribbons.
Cecelia found it difficult to meet the girl’s earnest, smiling gaze as the last time they’d met she’d been bouncing atop an earl. And she was certain the lovely girl had just serviced a prince upstairs.
Both dazed and amazed, she followed Genny past an intricate railing and toward a staircase leading to the lower level, this just as well appointed as the one to the second floor.
Before she stepped out of sight of the main floor, she caught a glimpse of a lithe masculine figure slithering toward the door, more shadow than man.
Count Adrian Armediano donned his hat over a shine of ebony hair and punched his fists into a dark jacket.
He glanced back toward their procession, and Cecelia nearly tripped down the stairs in her haste not to be seen.
“Is that the count from your do last month?” Francesca whispered from behind her. Never one for subtlety, she lifted on her tiptoes to watch him leave. “Where did you find him, Alexander? There’s something so off-putting about him, and yet familiar. As though I’ve hated him before, but I can’t remember why.”
“He’s done business with Redmayne,” the duchess replied pensively. “Supposedly he wields an immense amount of influence both here and internationally. I confess I was barely listening when the duke told me about him, because I was sifting through a trunk of samples sent to me from Syria at the time.”
“Redmayne should know better than to expect to distract you with conversation,” Francesca teased.
“Redmayne knows exactly what to do to distract me,” Alexandra said with a sly wink. “Cecil, you spent some time at the soiree talking with the count. What was he like?”
“Charming,” she answered. And a bit frightening, she didn’t say. Something about him bespoke a darkness—no, a deviousness—that had both intrigued her and set her on edge.
“Truly charming?” Alexandra challenged, “Or simply in comparison with your other conversation companion? My inscrutable brother-in-law.”
Cecelia wheezed out a nervous giggle, leaving the question unanswered. “Speaking of him, Genny, I’ll say the extra cleaning staff did a smashing job. One could never tell that only yesterday this entire place was crawling with police.”
With him.
She could feel his presence here. A sword over her head. A threat in her ear. A liquid weight low in her belly.
A thrilling, perplexing clench between her thighs.
I kissed Ramsay.
“The police did less damage than I feared,” Genny said with a relieved sigh. “More clutter than anything. We were even able to open for the evening. Now, let me take you on the tour.”
Belowstairs at Miss Henrietta’s School for Cultured Young Ladies was a revelation.
Because it was, in fact, a school for cultured young ladies. And uncultured ones. Older mothers. Immigrants. And people who might otherwise be sent to the workhouse.
Cecelia was barely aware of the enthusiastic Lilly joining their tour group as Genny led her and the Rogues past classrooms packed to the gills with women and, yes, even little girls, describing each class with aplomb and pride.
The ingenious arrangement both dazzled and humbled Cecelia. Some ladies sewed elaborate costumes, presumably for the employees abovestairs, training to be seamstresses and modistes. Others toiled in the kitchen with the chef, feeding the students, employees, and customers lavish meals while learning about a career in service to a grand house.
There were ongoing lessons in deportment, speech, civics, penmanship, and basic mathematics.
Genny led her past rooms of foreign ladies learning English, and beyond that, women operating a mock switchboard that resembled the one for the new telephone service the government had begun installing in the city.
Cecelia paused there, hoping to catch her breath as she took it all in. How brilliant. How utterly—
“One wonders”—Francesca’s sharp tone cut through her thoughts as her friend regarded Genny with narrow-eyed suspicion—“how these women, the young girls especially, afford their tuition.”
“The house pays it,” Lilly rushed to answer. “And men aren’t allowed belowstairs. Not ever. Even all the instructors are women.” She glanced over the line of ladies pulling large plugs from the switchboards and reconnecting them. Some worked with confidence, and others struggled, squinted, and became flustered beneath the regard of visitors.
To ease them, Cecelia moved down the hall away from the classrooms, toward a large arched door at the back of the manse. “How extraordinary,” she marveled, strange and unwanted tears threatening to brim in her eyes as the enormity of her new position impressed itself upon her. She turned to Lilly.
“You pay for their educations by—by entertaining the wealthy with vice? How do you feel about the arrangement?”
“It’s our choice and we make it.” Lilly’s answer rang with resolution.
Cecelia paused, searching the girl’s kohl-lined hazel eyes for fear or deception.
“Why?” Alexandra whispered.
“Why give any of those hard-won earnings to people you don’t care about?” Francesca pressed further. “Are you quite certain Henrietta doesn’t—didn’t force you to?”
Lilly’s eyes darkened, and her wig trembled with her outrage as she stepped from beneath the duchess’s touch. “I have the most honest profession in the world, Your Grace,” she answered with a dignified calm, though it was obvious
she’d been offended. “I’d rather dress in pretty clothes than sew them. And I’d much rather fleece wealthy men for money than serve their food or clean out their chamber pots. I like what I do. Most days I love it. Show me many people who are so lucky.”
“Truly?” Cecelia asked, a bit heartened by the emphatic declaration. “Do many of the other employees feel the same?”
Lilly patted her on the arm. “Here at Miss Henrietta’s, we’re lavished with handmade clothing tailored just to us. We get to sleep late and play all night. We’re served meals that any toff would be proud to eat. We’re provided rotating days off and medical care when we need it. This is far better than what’s out there on the streets or in factories. All that’s required of us is to keep our mouths closed, our ears and eyes open, and we each give an equal percentage of our earnings to the running of the school.”
“Well…” Francesca breathed in disbelief. “I’ll be buggered.”
Genny stepped forward, smoothing her hands over the lavender bodice that accentuated the pink hues in her ivory skin. “Many of the girls here are the daughters, mothers, sisters, or other kin of the women who work or have worked upstairs. The customers often lavish the lucky girls with jewelry, money, and gifts that they’re allowed to keep or send to their families.”
“But … what about the other day, Lilly? You’re not expected to … service the clientele?”
Her brown shoulders shook with laughter as she met Genny’s eyes. “That was my own business, ma’am. Some women find a full-time keeper, and a few rare ones get themselves husbands.”
“Husbands?” Alexandra gasped.
Lilly let out a guffaw, the only slip in her articulate and cultured manner thus far that whispered of a life once lived in a very different part of London. “I receive more marriage proposals monthly than London’s most sought-after debutantes, I’d wager. But I have too many men I enjoy in my bed to tie myself to just one.”
Cecelia found herself filling with a strange well of emotion. Relief, she initially thought. Then pride. And after that … joy. Her legacy wasn’t simply a den of vice, it was an entire philanthropic endeavor. How brilliant. She could think of no other word but that. Brilliant.
Marvelous, perhaps.
And terrifying. That a man could take this all from her. A man of single-minded resolve and fathomless fortitude. A man on a relentless quest for justice. Bedeviled with an almost pathological aversion to what he considered sin.
And also, an unspeakably wicked tongue.
I kissed Ramsay.
“Would you care to see upstairs now?” Genny offered, gesturing to the arched doors at the end of the corridor.
“Lead on,” Cecelia murmured, clustering close to Alexandra and Francesca as they followed Genny out into the garden square in the center of the building protected on all sides by the manse.
The cool of the gardens caressed her face, the high walls of the edifice creating shade even in the summer. The lush evergreen grass and vibrant blossoms reminded Cecelia of another garden.
Cecelia’s gaze locked to the hedgerow where she’d first spied Lilly with Lord Crawford. She stared at the spot, fixated by a sight transposing itself over the memory. A man with gold in his hair and ice in his eyes. And the woman—the woman had a familiar form and features.
The ones she looked at in the mirror every morning.
A copulation that had never taken place. And never would. Because Sir Cassius Gerard Ramsay wasn’t the type of man to dally out of doors.
He wasn’t the type to dally at all.
Except …
“I kissed Ramsay!”
The gardens fell silent. Not just silent. But still. Too still.
Until all three women turned in tandem to gape at her.
“Tell me you’re jokin’,” Genny demanded, advancing forward.
“I’m joking.” Cecelia said obediently. “I didn’t kiss Ramsay.”
“Thank heavens,” Alexandra breathed.
“He kissed me.”
* * *
Genny shooed them all up several flights of stairs and into the private residence, where she pulled them into Henrietta’s old bedroom, closed the door, and leaned against it. “Tell us everything. Where did he kiss you?”
“Nowhere but the lips, upon my word.” Cecelia’s cheeks heated.
It was only when Alexandra put a hand on her forearms that she realized she’d crossed them in a defensive gesture. “I think Miss Leveaux is asking where, geographically. Was it in the gardens last night?”
Cecelia nodded, feeling like a child about to be chided.
“I knew we should have saved you from going out there with him.” Francesca paced the room. Even the swish of her emerald train managed to sound angry.
Cecelia shook her head. “That really wasn’t neces—”
“Was he cruel to you?” Alexandra asked.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Francesca demanded.
“Well, I—”
“Does it seem he suspects you of being the Scarlet Lady?” Francesca drew up to Cecelia’s other side, creating a familiar buffer the trio made whenever one of them was in distress. “Did he do this to ruin you? Seduce you, maybe, to lower your guard?”
Cecelia shook her head. “That didn’t seem to be what he—”
“We’ll murder him first,” Francesca vowed. “You know we will.”
Alexandra scratched at her temple and tucked a stray hair into her cap. “It just doesn’t make any sense that Ramsay would use such deplorable physical cruelty. Redmayne insists his brother has lived like a monk for almost a decade. He doesn’t even keep a mistress.”
“And the mighty shall fall.” Genny’s quiet murmur sliced through the room like a claymore, silencing them all. “This,” she laughed, her eyes sparkling with victorious mischief at Cecelia. “This is too good. Too delicious. I couldn’t have planned this more perfectly, honey.”
“What are you on about?” Francesca directed an indignant scowl at Genny, as though she didn’t appreciate an interloper into what should be a Rogue-exclusive discussion.
“Don’t you see?” Genny navigated the crimson furniture of the boudoir toward them, her finger toying at the ringlet brushing her clavicle. “The Lord Chief Justice does want to ruin Hortense Thistledown, the Scarlet Lady. However”—she took Cecelia by the shoulders and turned her to face her friends—“he desires to woo Miss Cecelia Teague, the shy, bespectacled spinster bluestocking and daughter of a simple country vicar.”
Cecelia squirmed as her fellow Rogues gawked at her.
Genny continued, “Your Cassius Ramsay is a Scotsman with Scots appetites buried deep beneath British repression. Cecelia couldn’t be more suited to him. A soft body built for sin, but sturdy enough to take a rough Scottish pounding.” She slapped Cecelia on the rear.
“Genny!” Cecelia gasped and hopped forward, pressing her hands to her face and then her rear. “I never!”
“Tell me I’m wrong, then,” the woman challenged.
She wanted to … but then she remembered the latent hunger she’d sensed beneath his kiss. The urgency that bordered upon danger.
Alexandra, the only married Red Rogue, assessed Cecelia with new eyes, the eyes of a woman well used to the desire of a man who shared Ramsay’s blood. The British half, granted, though her husband’s paternal ancestry was Viking nobility dating all the way back to before William the Conqueror. One look at him and it was impossible to doubt he’d been spawned by marauders and battle-hungry savages.
“Cecil,” Alexander prodded. “Is it possible there’s truth to what Miss Leveaux says?”
Cecelia reached for the delicate little leaves carved into the dark-wood bedpost, tracing them intently as she answered without meeting anyone’s gaze. “I do not believe the Lord Chief Justice recognized me as Hortense Thistledown.”
“He wants you?” Francesca screwed her face in disbelief.
“Is that so difficult to fathom?” Cecelia’s retort escaped more pee
vishly than she’d intended. “That someone like him could want me?”
“No,” Francesca rushed, reaching for both her hands. “God no, Cecelia. That isn’t at all what I meant. Genny’s right, you’ve the illicit appeal of the most buxom of courtesans and the respectability of a church mouse. It’s not that we don’t believe anyone would want you, it’s that it’s difficult to process that someone like Ramsay would do such a cruel and calculated thing as kiss you in the gardens after pretending to be a paragon of respectability. Not to mention threatening you.”
“He—he didn’t seem cruel. Nor was he impertinent or disrespectful.” Cecelia didn’t want to defend him, but neither did she want him condemned for something she’d fully consented to.
Even enthusiastically participated in.
“In fact, he was … well, he didn’t kiss like someone who’d lived as a monk for a decade. Or he must have an excellent memory. His kiss was…” She hesitated. Warm and wet and demanding. It had hinted at a dormant beast, something violent, volcanic, and eminently masculine. But also soft, deferential, and rather lovely. What word encompassed all of that, and still held her privacy intact?
“We’re not to believe you enjoyed it, are we?” Genny recoiled. “He’s your enemy, Cecelia, or have you forgotten? He’d have you strung from the closest lamppost if he could.”
“I haven’t forgotten.” Cecelia insisted. “It’s only that, we connected in a rather constructive way. He’s—different from my initial estimation. Better, perhaps. Kinder. He said he and I were similar souls. It was as though he could see parts of himself in me.”
“I can guess which parts,” Genny muttered.
Alexandra smothered a laugh with her dainty hand but composed herself quickly. “What do you think he’s after, Cecil?” she queried. “Did he speak to you of intentions? Courtship?”
Cecelia shook her head, feeling oddly bereft. “He seemed worried about my reputation. We did speak of marriage at length, but more in the hypothetical sense, not in a way that would make one assume he was about to declare intentions. Rather the opposite. Indeed, we shared our reservations about the institution as a whole. Though, he seemed amenable to the idea of us seeing each other again.”
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