A Lady Unrivaled

by Roseanna M. White

  She blustered out a sigh. “Very well, then. But only so that you feel useful.”

  They followed the directions Kira had drawn out for them until they ended up before what appeared to be just another shelf filled with boxes of all shapes and sizes. He set his gaze on the middle one and scooted the boxes this way and that until the dark form came into view. Ella reached in and pulled it forward. The light struck the clay tiger’s crude face and illumined its empty eyes.

  He rested his hand on her shoulder. “Ready?”

  “Ready. Check to make sure we haven’t set off any silent alarms. Called in any thugs. No assassin-acrobats dropping down from the ceiling—”

  “Ella.” He laughed, because he couldn’t help it, and leaned over to kiss her cheek. Because he wanted to. Into her ear he whispered, “Do your part, love. Send them home.”

  “Right.” Ella reached into her handbag and extracted the black velvet bag. “Though it feels a bit anticlimactic. No one threatening me or confessing their secrets or anything.”

  “I can confess my secrets, if it will make you feel better.” He helped her with the drawstring when it caught and shook the gems into her palm. They were loose again, the Nottingham earrings holding only rubies now.

  Ella grinned at him over her shoulder. “Would you? Make them good.”

  “All right. Well . . . ” He waited for her to reach forward and work the first of the diamonds into the eye socket. She turned it this way, that, and for a moment he thought they were wrong, all of them wrong, that this wasn’t the statue of Dakshin Ray they had come from, it had all just been a mistake.

  Then it slid into place and held steady.

  Cayton breathed again, though he hadn’t realized he’d stopped. “My first confession—I have at least three Shakespearian plays memorized. Top to bottom and inside out.”

  She sent him a quick, wide-eyed stare. “Impressive—and yet you’ve never quoted them to me! Which ones? Hamlet?”

  “Not in full—King Lear. MacBeth. And . . . A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

  “Ah, perhaps I shall call you Puck instead of Drat.” She reached toward the second eye with the second diamond. “What about Much Ado About Nothing? I always fancied that one.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me in the slightest—everyone ends up married.”

  She drew her hand away, smiling. It faded into something not quite happy and not quite sad. “There.”

  “There.” He slid his arm around her again and studied the statue for a moment. It looked . . . right. Like more than it had been—a frame without a painting. Yet not what someone had probably thought it was once—a god. It was clay, molded by man’s hands. Clay made to frame diamonds likely mined in blood. Jewels worth more than any two rocks had a right to be, nestled in dried mud.

  Shakespeare would have loved such ironic poetry.

  Ella elbowed him. “Whistle.”

  “Right.” He chose a tune she’d been humming to Addie that morning as they all strolled down the Champs-Élysées and pushed the statue back to be in profile, into the shadows.

  A few minutes later the Staffords meandered their way, still chattering at the director.

  Ella put on her brightest smile and hurried over to Brook with that bounce that only Ella could make look so natural. “Brook! It’s here, it is. I thought it must be. The whole collection from the Madhya Pradesh. The tiger, the boat, even the—”

  “Ella, calm down.” Brook laughed and settled a hand on Ella’s arm. She turned to the director. “Forgive her. She has become overly fascinated with all things from India.”

  The director smiled, but his brows pulled down. “From Madhya Pradesh? Non, non, mademoiselle. These are all from Jaipur—I found them myself, from an antiquities dealer there.”

  Ella straightened, lifted her chin, and shook her head. “That may be where you purchased them, monsieur, but I assure you—they are from Madhya. I have been researching it extensively, and—”

  “Here we go.” Cayton stepped forward and took her arm. “Ella, he doesn’t want to hear about your endless research.”

  She spun on him, mouth agape. “Well of course he does. It’s his job!”

  “Oui,” the director agreed, stepping forward from between the Staffords. “I am much intrigued. How can you be sure of their origins, mademoiselle?”

  She turned back around, giving him the full force of her smile. “Oh, it’s very simple. You see, I stumbled across a book. . . .”

  Cayton only listened with half an ear as she spun the tale she had indeed pieced together from her notes. Of artifacts raided and stolen and cursed, of the British tromping in and seizing them, of East India Company men trading and selling and buying until they landed in Jaipur some two hundred years later. Statue and diamonds separated, though Ella didn’t mention that part.

  The director listened with rapt attention. “Incroyable. You must have done nothing but read for months, mademoiselle, to find all that.”

  “I have absolutely ruined my eyes.” She clapped her hands together. “And there they are. So remarkable, monsieur. I have dreamed of finding them, of shipping them all back to the museum in Madhya, where they rightfully belong, righting a wrong wrought by my English forebears—they are for sale, you say? My brother—the Duke of Nottingham—has granted me fifty pounds to spend on this enterprise, though he deems it nonsense. Will that be enough? I already have the director of the museum in India waiting, eager to welcome them home.”

  The director was back to beaming. “Of course! And for a friend of the princesse, I will even offer to ship them back to India for you.”

  Ella bounced again. There was something enchanting about it, the way her curls sprang up and down. The light in her eyes. “Oh monsieur, how generous you are. I have the direction right here!” She pulled a slip of paper from her handbag and waved it in the air. “Cayton can help you box them all up. Can’t you, darling?”

  Cayton sighed. “I’m sure Monsieur Director has men to handle this properly, my dear. He won’t want to worry with it now.”

  Monsieur Director waved at him. “Non, non, now is good. Here, I have a crate. We shall right a wrong. Beautiful. Très, très belle.”

  And so a crate was brought out and Cayton cajoled into loading the tiger—its face turned from the director—into it, along with a boat and a something he couldn’t quite identify but which looked a bit like a very small building. They added straw, Ella gushed, Brook chattered, and Stafford nodded in an approving, ducal way.

  The director himself nailed the lid onto the crate, looking as though he were returning the Holy Grail to King Arthur. “Voilà! I will see it is shipped at the first possible moment, mademoiselle.”

  Ella leaned over and smacked a loud kiss to the man’s cheek. “You’re an absolute doll, monsieur. Shall we handle paperwork once we are upstairs?”

  Monsieur Director’s cheeks went pink. “Oui. And I do hope you mention our humble establishment to your brother.”

  “Of course I shall.” With a sigh of satisfaction, she tucked her hand back into the crook of Cayton’s elbow. “I’ll write him straightaway.”

  Cayton let her pull him a few feet before he cleared his throat. “Ella.”

  “Hmm?”

  “You’re going the wrong way.”

  “Right.” She did an about-face and had the good sense to let him lead her out.

  Once his back was to the director, he let himself grin. It was a rather grand adventure after all.

  Kira stood alone in the vast foyer of Andrei’s vast Parisian home and waited. She wore a pretty dress in pale blue, to match her eyes. But not one that he’d bought her—one she’d purchased before, when she was just Kira Belova, ballerina, and not Kira Belova, Andrei Varennikov’s mistress. She’d done her dark curls up in a simple chignon, set a fashionable but modest hat upon her head.

  She’d seen Sergei that morning. Her friends at the ballet. They had all kissed her cheeks and asked how she’d been, and she’d done a p
irouette just to prove to them that she could—that they could, if ever they suffered an injury. Sergei had watched her closely through the impromptu scene from The Rite of Spring that she’d joined them in, and he had offered her a place in the corp again.

  It had felt good. To prove the doctors wrong. To know she still had the skill, the strength.

  But somewhere in England’s rains, the desire had faded. She’d smiled at him, thanked him, and said she needed to go home. She hadn’t seen her family in too long.

  He was Russian—he understood.

  Andrei was Russian too, but she doubted he would understand. He had worked too hard to escape his roots, and he would not respect her desire to return to hers.

  He didn’t have to respect it. He just had to promise not to hunt her down and take out his anger on her family.

  “Ma chérie.” He emerged from his office, a smile on his face, and paused a few feet away to look at her. Just to look at her, as if she were another painting on his walls, another statue for his conservatory. “I missed you.”

  “Did you?” She had her doubts, but they weren’t to the point. She folded her arms over her chest. “That letter you sent with this deadline nearly got me killed. He went mad—Rushworth. Absolutely mad.”

  Andrei chuckled and waved it away. Nothing but a fly, a nuisance. “He needed inspiration. And here you are, back in Paris—I trust they are here too? With my diamonds?”

  She sighed and dropped her arms again. “Andrei, there are no diamonds—or at least, not with them. They never had them. They had only rubies.”

  He froze, muscle by muscle. “Pardonnez-moi?”

  “Rubies. They had only rubies, and now Rushworth is dead too. I did what I could. I brought the proof of it all.” She reached into her handbag—blue to match her dress—and pulled out the folded sheets of paper, crafted by Stafford’s jeweler. Letters of authenticity for two rubies, two carats each, valued at but a few hundred pounds British sterling.

  She handed him the paper. And then the stones. Two rubies, two carats each—provided by Catherine, who had fished them out of her brother’s things. The rubies that the Nottinghams had planted for them to find last autumn, to mistake for the diamonds.

  Andrei cursed and tossed the rubies to the floor. “Unacceptable!”

  She didn’t flinch. She certainly didn’t dare tremble. She raised her chin. “Indeed. And I am sorry I could not return with better news. But I can give you only the truth. Perhaps the Fire Eyes are out there somewhere, but they are not in England.”

  Andrei turned away, cursing again. In French, in Russian. Then he took a deep breath and faced her once more. His hands were in fists, but he held them against his legs. “You did your best, ma belle. Merci.”

  “You are welcome. But before you go on, allow me to say . . . I appreciate all you have given me. But you will marry soon, and my career is done, and I miss my family. I plan to go home. To Russia. I will not need the flat or the clothes or the jewels.” She motioned to the boxes that she had paid to be carried in along with her stacked just inside the front door. The silks, the furs. The diamonds and sapphires and emeralds.

  His fist relaxed. His face moved from careful civility to bemusement. “What will you do? Without the ballet, without your flat?”

  She spread her arms and had a feeling her smile was one he’d never seen on her before. “I’ll live, Andrei. I’ll go to Optina on pilgrimage, to Kitezh on the solstice. I’ll listen for the church bells and to the chanting of the monks.”

  He shook his head, but it wasn’t a denial. Just more confusion. “You can give all this up? Paris, this life?”

  “It was never really mine. It was yours.”

  “Ah, Kira.” He closed the distance then, but there was no threat in the line of his shoulders. He just came close, set his hands on her shoulders, and kissed her forehead. “Take the jewels, at least. The ones I bought for you. Your family may need them someday.”

  She could only shake her head. “No. I will not be in your debt, Andrei, I will not—”

  “What need have I of a few baubles? Take them, milaya. Sell them before you leave Paris if you prefer, but do not return home empty-handed.”

  Her eyes slid shut. He could be so cruel. And he could be so kind. “For my family, in case we come on hard times.”

  He rubbed her shoulders and then slid his hands down her arms to grasp hers. “It was a good year. I will remember it fondly.”

  It hadn’t been a good year. She’d try to forget him. But it had led her where she needed to be. She slipped away from his hands, from his house, and ran back to the taxi waiting for her outside—his servants hot on her heels, loading the jewelry cases back in. She would sell them today, she would go home, she would dance with a tambourine in hand, and her knee wouldn’t hurt.

  She would live.

  Epilogue

  Ella stroked Addie’s hair down one more time, smiling at the way it curled around her ear. At how her mouth pursed in her sleep, trying to suck on the thumb that had fallen out. She was the sweetest thing. So very beautiful. Ella couldn’t wait to start teaching her to say “Mama,” but that seemed like something that should wait until the little one’s father actually proposed.

  Susan, Lady Cayton, smiled and eased down into the rocking chair Tabby had just vacated. “It’s good to be home. It’ll be better when we get to Azerly Hall—you’ll join us in Yorkshire, won’t you? Your brother and his wife can come with you, or your mother.”

  “Mama would probably agree, though I daresay Rowena just wants to get back to Midwynd.” They would be on their way in the next few days, now that Augusta was two weeks old. They hadn’t wanted to travel too soon.

  “Oh good.” Susan leaned back and set herself to rocking. “I can’t tell you how glad I am, Ella. I just can’t tell you how glad. I wasn’t sure he’d ever give himself another chance at love.”

  Ella laughed. “He didn’t. I just didn’t give him a choice.”

  “Good. He’s in his garret now, I daresay, if you want to find him. I think I’ll just sit here for a while and watch my beautiful little girl sleep.”

  Ella bounced. “Perfect—how do I find this garret?”

  “Up the stairs at the end of this hallway. You can’t miss it.”

  She doubted that but tried it anyway. And given that there was only one set of stairs and only one door on the hall at the top of them, she might indeed get to claim a victory in following directions. An occasion surely worthy of a celebratory kiss. Moving silently, she stepped through the door.

  The room was awash in colors. On paper, on canvas, a few random splashes on the walls that made her grin. She feasted on it for a long moment before turning to look for him.

  He stood near the window, his back to her, an easel before him. Intent upon his task, he didn’t seem to hear her, so she slipped farther into the room and looked around a bit more.

  She paused before the winged unicorn, nearly ruining her stealth with a gasp of appreciation. It was exactly as she’d pictured it that night in the garden. The cloud-castle in an evening sky, sunset colors painting its foundation. The creature magnificent in the foreground, soaring through the sky. And Addie, a bit more grown up, running up the stairs. Addie and her.

  She blinked back tears and pressed a hand to her lips. It was the best gift anyone could ever give her, and it wasn’t even for her. She couldn’t wait to see it hanging upon the walls in the nursery, where Addie could wonder at the beauty. And then someday wonder at how her father could have captured it so perfectly.

  Needing him, Ella gave up on silence and spun, giving him time only to lower his brush before launching herself at him. “You magnificent man.”

  He oomfed at the impact. And laughed. “Far better than Drat.”

  “You put me in the cloud-castle with her.” She cupped his face, let herself get lost in the summer-green of his eyes. “I could kiss you.”

  “I won’t stop you.” Mischief in his eyes, he set his brush o
nto the palette and slid both onto a table. “But if you liked that one . . .” He nodded toward the painting he’d been working on.

  The white of the canvas was still visible in a few places, but the color in the rest took her breath away. Crimson on one leaf, floating down from an invisible branch. Orange and saffron behind it. An azure sky with a few white clouds.

  Cayton, smiling. Addie, laughing as she chased a butterfly. And her. In bridal white. The very image the Lord had given her.

  The tears wouldn’t be blinked back this time. She gripped his hand, certain she was dreaming. How else . . . ? How . . . ? “Cayton, I . . . What is this?”

  “A question.” He slipped behind her, arms around her waist, his head right beside hers so he could look at the painting with her. “I haven’t got a ring yet—all the family jewelry is in Yorkshire. So I thought I’d give you a painting for now. Do you like it?”

  Her laugh was half a cry. She turned, wrapped her arms around his neck, and pressed her lips to his.

  When he pulled away a long minute later, his eyes were bright, his smile sunny. “Is that your answer?”

  “Maybe.” She made a show of looking at the painting, tapped a finger to her lips. “Though I do have one complaint. You made my hair red.”

  He cleared his throat and tugged on a curl. She wasn’t sure what his purpose was until he’d maneuvered her head next to the canvas and held the real curl beside her painted ones.

  “Drat.” She pulled the lock free of his fingers. “Perfect match.”

  Cayton chuckled and slid his arms around her again. “Yes,” he said against her mouth. “Oddly enough . . . we are.”

  Author’s Note

  Thank you so much for traveling with me through the tales of the Fire Eyes and the group of friends who found themselves in possession of them! I had fun in this final installment wrapping up the mystery of the red diamonds and expounding a bit on their history. When I decided they should have come from a statue, I had a wonderful moment in discovering that there really was a museum dealing in Asian antiquities in Paris at the time—utterly perfect for my plot!