Jeannie blushed. “Oh, ma’am. I have always wanted to visit London. You know it!”
“I do know it. And I warn you, if I catch you humming a single bar of ‘Rule, Britannia!’ I’ll leave you behind when I go home.”
Jeannie sniffed and flounced out of the cab. The poor goose had grown up dreaming of sparkle and lace. Hoping for luxury, she’d leapt at the chance to work as a lady’s maid, just as her mother had once done for Anna’s mother. But what a disappointment she’d found in her mistress’s households! Wool instead of silk, mud in the carpets, whisky in tin cups instead of champagne.
Nevertheless, Anna had promised to supervise and educate her, and she would continue to do her best at it. “I am the mistress of this house,” Anna said after joining Jeannie on the curb. “However I dress is precisely how I am meant to dress. It is the guests who will feel themselves inappropriate. Do you understand?”
The girl opened her mouth to argue, then evidently thought better of it. With a hike of her chin, she followed the driver around back to oversee the removal of the luggage.
Anna adjusted the hem of her cloak, straightened her shoulders, and marched up the steps to bang the knocker.
The door creaked open. Somebody had left it ajar. Somebody was getting sacked tonight. Anna did not pay for incompetence in her staff.
She stepped into the entry hall, a rectangular space paved by checkerboard marble, topped by a curving split staircase, also of marble. The English had no restraint: they piled ancient statues into every nook and cranny, and managed to find ways to make staircases expensive. That bronze balustrade had probably cost her a year’s interest on her harvest profits in the lowlands.
From behind her came some noise. She turned and found herself locking eyes with a squat, barrel-chested man whose bald skull gleamed in the gaslight.
“Guest?” he croaked—then frowned as his gaze ran down her bedraggled cloak. “Servants around the back,” he said, and shot a stream of tobacco juice into a spittoon standing behind the door.
Anna snorted. The English are very formal, are they? “I am no servant.” Whereas Jeannie’s accent had smoothed, her own had grown new burrs with every southbound mile they’d traveled. She now sounded like one of the islanders, and the little man frowned in consternation.
“What?” he demanded. “Speak English.”
She stepped toward him. He looked startled by his own retreat, and moved his hand into his jacket—a threatening gesture that she acknowledged with a lift of one brow.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Brandish a weapon at your master’s wife.”
His jaw slackened. She caught a glimpse of the tobacco packed into his mouth. “You aren’t,” he said uncertainly.
She smiled.
She had not been born beautiful, like Jeannie. Her cousins teased her that her pale green eyes were witchy, her copper hair the color of devil’s flames. But she had been born with a talent for smiling: with the mere curve of her mouth, she could make men stumble and gape, or quail in momentary fear, for reasons they would never manage to explain to themselves.
The brute was not immune. He let go of his weapon, his eyes widening. “You are the countess.”
She narrowed her eyes. What an odd remark. Had Lockwood been describing her to his staff? “Naturally. And your name, sir?”
“Danvers. But, ma’am, his lordship ain’t . . .” His gaze shifted past her. Jeannie was staggering across the threshold, a trunk sliding from her grip.
“Assist Miss Galbraith,” Anna said. “And have our rooms aired and readied. Which way is Lord Lockwood?”
The man made a helpless grunt. Then he lifted his finger to point down the darkened hall. “But, ma’am—my lady—I’ll warn you—”
She did not accept advice from rogues. Besides, what news could he impart of her husband that she did not already know? It took an utter blackguard to abandon his newlywed bride on her wedding night, and to disappear for three years without a word, much less to let her discover his return, months delayed, by a headline in the newspaper.
“Help Miss Galbraith,” she repeated coolly, and turned on her heel to find her errant husband.
The noises of the party drew her around the corner, and to doors that opened into a long gallery. Pausing there, she beheld a scene of complete debauchery: gentlemen in shirtsleeves with waistcoats flapping, women powdered and painted, feathers sagging from their hair. A stray dog or two frolicked amid scraps thrown by cheeky boys. Violinists were wandering among the crowd, sawing out street ditties—multiple ditties, none of them in tune. One wore a monkey on his shoulder. The creature was lifting his little hat in time to the music.
Out the windows that lined one side of the gallery, torches lit a lawn filled with couples. Half of them appeared to be dancing, but to no uniform rhythm or step. Pieces of clothing littered the grass—and glittering shards of broken glasses—and bodies, intertwined.
“Goodness,” she murmured. But her own voice was lost in the din of chatter and discordant tunes and the sudden explosion of a bottle hurled into the wall. “Watch for the paintings!” somebody cried.
It was then that she noticed the other wall of the gallery.
The paintings there showed scenes of slaughter.
After a moment, when her pulse slowed, she realized that these must be the Ashdown paintings. She had read about them in a newspaper she’d purchased at the platform in Peterborough. Her husband was a patron of the artist Miss Aurora Ashdown, and had hosted an exhibit recently for the titillation of his English friends.
Patron. She wondered if that was a polite euphemism, and Miss Ashdown was his mistress. Otherwise, why would he promote such nightmarish scenes? The artist had talent, but taste . . . ?
She averted her eyes from the paintings. The people cavorting beneath them hardly made a better sight. Gritting her teeth, she picked up her skirts and shoved her way into the crowd, using her elbows to clear a path for herself.
“Hey! Watch yourself—”
“Oi, sweetheart! What’s your hurry?”
She pivoted sharply at this last remark, catching the startled eye—and then, between her thumb and forefinger, the ear—of a lad who looked barely old enough to shave.
“What was that?” she asked sweetly. “Whose sweetheart am I?”
He blinked, his reddened eyes and chinless, sallow face lending him the look of a snared rabbit. “I—I—I reckon you’re nobody’s, ma’am!”
Not the cleverest retraction, but the sentiment served. Anna released him, wiped her hand on her skirts, and resumed her progress.
It did occur to her, as glass crunched under her boot and she spied the salon ahead, that she might not recognize Lockwood. Three years and eight months, after all. She herself had changed, so she liked to think. She had far better taste now than to trifle with bankrupt English lordlings, particularly those who had no better use for her money than the despoiling of decency and common sense—
There he was.
She drew up a foot inside the salon, watching through narrowed eyes as William Alexander Knollys Devaliant, fifth Earl of Lockwood, extricated himself from a sofa heaped with three scantily clad women, his balance clearly unsteady.
A pair of hands clung to him as he rose. Those hands belonged to a woman whose hair had been dyed a brassy false red. Lockwood, stepping forward, looked surprised to find himself caught. Looking down and discovering the hands that held him, he pulled them free, lifting one of them to his mouth for a kiss.
• • •
On occasional Tuesdays, Liam opened his doors to the crème de la crème of London society. On occasional Sundays, his staff made the invitations.
The contrast never failed to amuse him—particularly now, as some unnamed drug swam through his brain and lent him a novel perspective. Last Tuesday, some five hundred well-heeled Londoners—members of Parliament and gentlemen farmers and lords—had winced before Miss Ashdown’s paintings. Her images of the violent insurrection in British India h
ad seemed to those guests like accusations. Society folk had murmured among themselves, then fled to the ballroom to guzzle champagne.
Tonight’s crowd, on the other hand, cavorted beneath those same paintings, admiring but not shocked. Working people—servants and barmaids, factory men and honest criminals—saw nothing unusual in such graphic depictions. Violence and power were but two sides of the same coin; this crowd knew it.
Liam had kept the ballroom closed. The music room stood locked as well, the interior burned after more recent festivities. Tonight, the musicians wandered freely, and the dancing took place on the lawn outside. The grass proved a novelty for this crowd, to whom London’s finest parklands stood closed.
In the salon, he’d gathered the small number of men whom he’d invited personally. They were penned there by Liam’s footmen, who had stationed themselves in postures of servitude but who nevertheless managed to loom in a manner that discouraged guests from pushing past them. Few of the celebrants noticed this, much less wondered if it was deliberate. Half of them were drunk, a quarter more dazed, like him, by the toxic tarry substance that Colthurst had brought to smoke.
Liam’s cousin was sober, though. Stephen Devaliant had accepted the invitation, delivered this afternoon in the reading room at White’s, very casually, as though there was nothing unusual in it. He was doing a very good job of pretending he had not tried to have Liam killed four years ago, much less that the greatest shock of his life had not been to learn of Liam’s return, this past autumn, and not in a casket—for Liam, despite his cousin’s best efforts, had survived.
Liam walked over to the sofa, his mere approach causing Stephen’s conversation with a courtesan to fracture into stuttering syllables. “More champagne?” he asked his cousin. Stephen’s glass had remained empty for an hour now. Hunted creatures could not afford to muddle their brains.
Stephen glanced up. He was Liam’s elder by eighteen months, with a full head of brown hair and a lineless face. Had he spent three years battling starvation, however, he might have looked different. His hair might have been bleached, his cheeks hollow, and his crow’s-feet deeper, to match Liam’s.
“How kind of you,” he said. “No, I’m entirely content.” His smile looked fixed; no doubt he was racking his brain for a reason to leave. Stephen aspired to public office—a seat in Parliament would go far to effacing the commercial stain of his wealth—and to that end, he cultivated a pious reputation. He sponsored charities. He paid newspapers to publish his homilies on Christian virtue. He volunteered as churchwarden in the parish where London’s most powerful men prayed.
To be seen at this raucous party would do him no favors. But he accepted all of Liam’s invitations. He could not afford to do otherwise. He was not yet certain if Liam knew what he had done.
“But it’s very fine champagne,” Liam said. The finest that money could buy—a fitting slogan for everything in this house. In the last eight months, he’d spent vast amounts of money refurbishing his London property. The glitter now gave him a headache, but it made excellent camouflage. Blinded by his opulent good taste, nobody ever bothered to look too closely at him. “Come,” he told his cousin. “Just a glass.”
“Just a glass,” echoed the courtesan on a giggle—she was one of Colthurst’s, a long-limbed beauty with a lisp and dyed scarlet hair.
Her hair annoyed Liam. He had told Colthurst not to bring redheads. He considered hunting down Colthurst and gutting the man—an image so vivid and pleasurable that he abruptly reconsidered the wisdom of trying Colthurst’s drugs.
Stephen’s mouth was tightening. This game was a delicate one; push him too far, bully him in any way, and he would find a credible reason to withdraw. “I’m certain it’s very fine champagne,” he said. “I order it occasionally myself, when the Lafitte is not available.”
Liam laughed. “Of course,” he agreed, “you would only drink Lafitte.” He felt kinder now to the courtesan, who must have been annoying Stephen, to set him so on edge as to allude to his own wealth. For a time, this had been Stephen’s great advantage—his only solace for having been born to a second son, and thereby deprived of the earldom.
That trick of birth had been the greatest tragedy of Stephen’s life to date. Liam meant to correct that, but he was taking his time. Revenge made an excellent hobby.
Stephen rose, drawing himself as straight as possible to diminish the difference between their respective heights. “A lovely evening,” he said. “I’m afraid I must be going.”
“Of course.” Liam straightened, looking down his nose, and Stephen’s mouth pinched. By their next meeting, no doubt, he’d be wearing lifts in his shoes. “Shall I walk you out?”
“I believe I can find the way,” Stephen said stiffly. “If you’ll recall, I once lived here myself.”
Ah, yes. The old reminder of their shared boyhood. After Stephen’s father had died, he had come to live with Liam’s family for a time. “Of course!” Liam clapped his cousin on the shoulder, just as a brother would, and felt the man flinch.
He had several advantages over Stephen, in fact, the earldom being the least of them. Thanks to Stephen, he had learned a great deal about torture, and come to grasp that the usual methods—floggings and starvation and terror—were not useful. Pain stripped a man of his humanity. What remained became bestial and wild: it could not be controlled. Common tortures were useless, then, unless one intended to put down the animal directly.
The subtler tortures held a world of possibility, though. To invite a man over and ask him to drink, to smile at him in one’s club, to clap him on the back—to keep him startled, second-guessing, dreaming of poison, his paranoia ever-growing: it made a fine game, far better than the brief satisfaction of a bullet in the brain.
“Perhaps I’ll drop by tomorrow,” he said into his cousin’s ear. “You can catch me up on the world of commerce.”
Stephen recoiled from this murmur and threw a hunted look over his shoulder as he hurried away.
“What’s so funny?” The courtesan wound her arms around Liam, the cloying scent of her lavender perfume tickling his nose as she pulled him down onto the sofa beside her.
“A great deal.” Laughter escaped Liam, though he no longer felt amused. The laugh felt like an animal, clawing and wrestling out of his throat. Stop it. The sound of the chatter intensified all around him, rattling and buzzing like bees.
Foul drug. Colthurst should know better. Liam wanted a numbing, not a false enlivening. He needed a quiet place to wait this out. He stood again, realizing belatedly that the courtesan still clutched on to him. He pried away her wrists, dropping a casual kiss on her knuckles when she protested.
“Find someone else,” he told her with a smile. He did not like being touched, but there was no need to advertise it.
The woman, perhaps hard of hearing, misunderstood the kiss as an invitation. “I’ll put you in a better mood,” she said, twining herself around him.
“I will not pay for that,” came a woman’s voice from the doorway.
The gaslights seemed to flicker. His heart missed a beat. Liam found himself abruptly nauseated, mouth dry.
“Are you all right?” asked the courtesan, her eyes wide with concern.
A mirror hung on the wall beyond her. Liam did not let himself focus on it. He would not like what he saw. These were not feelings he could feel.
His mouth still held the semblance of a smile. He widened that smile as he pivoted from one redhead toward the other.
She filled the doorway completely. She was taller than he remembered, her jaw squarer. Her lips were full, wide, sneering. He had remembered the feel of them better than the look.
Ah, but this drug was wicked. It caused her to intensify into impossible vividness, a vision in copper and green and cream. In all the lands he had crossed to come home, there had been no shade like her eyes: leaves were not vibrant enough, grass was too dark. Her hair was blazingly bright, the color of freshly polished pennies. The world behind h
er was breaking apart, swimming in little colored dots, like schools of fish.
“You should not be here,” he said to her. God above, not now. Sober would serve them both better.
Her smile gutted him. He had forgotten the trick of that smile—how it could spark a light inside a man that made him feel untethered from the earth, or gut him more deeply than a blade. “And you should be in hell,” she said. “Alas, few of us end up where we belong.”
CHAPTER TWO
Three years and eight months made a great deal of difference. In that space of time, Anna had cut romance out of her heart completely. She could look across the room now at what was, objectively, a very handsome man, his chiseled lips turning into a slight and impenetrable smile, and feel nothing but irritation.
He looked older. His gold-brown hair remained thick, his body still tall and leanly fashioned. But new crow’s-feet bracketed his eyes. Wherever he’d adventured, he’d squinted at the sights. And the look in his eyes . . .
His eyes had always dazzled her. The color of dark honey, of fine Scottish whisky, they had glimmered across rooms at her, caused her breath to come short. But they looked flat now, empty. They watched her with the inhuman, steady focus of a wolf.
The scarlet-haired woman was gawking. Anna spoke crisply. “We have business to discuss.”
He appeared at last to recollect himself. Straightening, he offered her a bow that was too deep to be anything but mockery. “Won’t you join us?” he said with a sweep of his hand toward the sofa he’d just vacated.
For a moment, she remained stock-still, stinging beneath a wave of realization:
He was not ashamed.
He was not embarrassed.
He did not even seem surprised to see her, much less glad.
In reply, she turned and strode for the exit.
Moments later, he passed her, moving with a swiftness that belied his earlier loss of balance. “Follow me,” he said casually over his shoulder.
The Sins of Lord Lockwood Page 2