“For what?”
“For being so cold to my brother.” She waved him into a chair. “I hope you will always prove so cold to him.”
He smiled faintly. He was coming to understand her better now. A brother like that would have driven him to become a misanthrope, too. “You understand there are more private terms to discuss. Terms we cannot put into writing.”
“Yes. I hoped we might speak of them now.” She pulled open the drapes. The cloudy light fell across her, making her skin opalescent.
Her beauty was truly remarkable. He admired it as he might a sculpture in a museum: worthy of praise, but nothing to do with him. “Did you ask Peter about the discrepancies in the accounts?”
“He claims ignorance. Accused me of misunderstanding the finances.” She sat down, clasping her hands tightly atop her neatly cleared desktop. For a moment, she frowned, clearly wrestling with some private emotion. “Perhaps the accountant was wrong. I believe Peter would embezzle from the company profits—he never loved this place as I do. His dream is a career in politics, not art. But to falsify our clients’ accounts . . . it’s plain thievery. He doesn’t just put our company at risk by stealing from them; he risks his friendships in society, and those mean everything to him.”
“You say no one else has access to the client accounts. No trustees of any kind.”
“No,” she said softly. “Everleigh’s has always been a family affair. No shareholders. And by the terms of our father’s will, Peter retains sole directorship until I marry.”
“Then no one else could be responsible,” Christian said. “And the evidence is plain. He’s been at this game for two years at least.”
She blew out a breath. Then a bitter smile twisted her mouth. “He lies so freely.” She ripped apart her hands, clenching the edge of the desktop. “The moment we wed, Palmer—I am suing for control of the finances.”
He nodded. “And I will support you in every way.” That was their bargain. “Just as soon as this other matter is resolved. It won’t be long now.”
She sat back, studying him gravely. “Are you certain? Demidov—or Bolkhov; whatever his real name is—declined the invitation to the party.” She opened a drawer, handed him the note.
Christian recognized the handwriting. That illiterate scrawl. He’d seen it only once before, on the note that had sent him rushing to York, too late to save his brother.
“I don’t understand such men,” she said. “Revenge is such a waste of energy. Has he nothing else to occupy him?”
Christian gave her a measuring look. She knew the danger now. He had explained it very clearly, the night they had agreed to marry. But her composure seemed genuine. No fear. None of the anger she rightfully should have felt upon discovering herself at the center of a web designed to snare a lunatic.
But perhaps she felt trapped in that web herself. She needed help if she meant to protect the auction rooms from her brother.
He wished he were a different man. Able to reassure her. Able to apologize, or feel regret for the position in which he’d placed her. Instead, he said, “He mentions a gift in this note.”
“Yes.” She offered a thin smile. “It is the custom among Russians to felicitate the newly engaged with a present.” She reached into her drawer again, handing over a small object, gleaming. A ring.
His jaw clenched. The gold was as bright as the day it had been forged. The bastard had polished it.
“You recognize it.”
Go with my blessing. Never forget that I am proud of you. “Yes,” he said. Bolkhov had stripped it from his hand four years ago, in that cave in the Hindu Kush.
The graveyard at Susseby currently overlooked a set of chimneys rising from rubble. After he rebuilt the house, he would bury this ring with his father, to whom it had belonged.
“He proposed it as a wedding ring, did you see? Had you not told me the whole of it already, I would have found that quite odd.” She cleared her throat. “Better than chocolates, though, I suppose.”
There was the regret he’d been searching for. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I have put you into a fine mess here.”
“But you will get me out of another one.” She straightened a pen lying next to the inkwell. “I would eat a dozen more of those chocolates, if that’s what it took to save this company from ruin.”
He didn’t doubt it. At odd moments, she reminded him a little of Lilah. Both women had steel at their core, and the grit to endure any number of vicissitudes, as long as it guaranteed their aims.
It seems quite pleasant, never to be expected to endure. Lilah had told him that once. And he had wanted nothing more in that moment than to guarantee she never endured another injustice in her life.
Lilah’s secrets were not his to share. Catherine, ignorant, had decided to keep her on as an assistant, which was . . . inconvenient. Infuriating. It held Lilah too close to the eye of this storm.
But Christian had bitten his tongue bloody against the urge to suggest that Catherine reconsider, demote her back to a hostess. If he could not offer Lilah a future, then he would not sabotage her chance at something better than the butcher.
The smell of Susseby was back in the air now. He pushed it out of his lungs as he rose.
Catherine stood as well. “Do you know, it’s a pity Demidov—Bolkhov—turned out to be rotten. His wares will fetch a very handsome profit for us. That candelabrum alone will go for a hundred pounds.”
“All the better for you,” he said flatly. “He won’t be alive to take his share.” He slipped the ring into his pocket. “Your hand is too fine for such a heavy band. What is your taste? Diamonds? Emeralds?”
“Either.”
He angled a black smile at her. Never had a betrothed couple been so well matched in their transparent lack of enthusiasm. “Perhaps you should choose the ring yourself. I expect you know jewels better than I do.”
A light knock came at the door. “Come,” called Catherine. “No,” she said to him, as light footsteps halted behind him. “My brother handles all the gemstones. But I hardly want his advice on the matter. Miss Marshall, you seemed to have a fine eye for jewels. Have you any suggestions?”
He held himself very still.
“Diamonds,” came her low, husky reply, “would be the usual choice. But amethyst would complement your eyes quite well, Miss Everleigh. Lord Palmer, allow me to congratulate you now in person.”
He rose and turned, offering a slight bow. She looked fatigued. Deeper shadows under her eyes than he’d ever seen, though she was back in town now, where there was light even in the small hours of the morning.
She could not hold his gaze. “I’m interrupting,” she said. “I’ll come back later.”
“Was there something that needed my attention?” Catherine asked.
He knew he should leave. But he could not look away from her. She sensed his attention. He could tell by her rising color. “Mr. Batten has finished the restoration of the tapestries. Will you have a look?”
“I’ll be down shortly. Apprise Lord Palmer as you walk him out. I didn’t get a chance to tell him of the repairs.”
“Yes, miss.” Very stiffly, she led Christian out the door.
“You’ve no interest in the tapestries,” Lilah said to him in the hall.
“No, not really.”
“I’ll let you go, then.”
Stupid, that the words could catch in his chest like that. That the proof of her wrecked sleep should disturb him so deeply. It was a far milder toll than what he sought to spare her. He would go. At once.
But he heard himself say, “No. I’ll see the mappemonde now.”
In silence she led him down two flights of stairs, into an empty laboratory whose tables were littered with antiques in disrepair. Two tapestries stood stretched against the walls. He walked over to the mappemonde, gazing on it for a long moment. To imagine that this was how men had once envisioned the world: small expanses of fertile land surrounded by vast, dragon-riddled
seas—and the darker, unknown terra incognita. How had the uncertainty not driven them mad?
But perhaps, in a world lit only by candles, they had felt better acquainted, more comfortable with such darkness.
He glanced at Lilah, who was staring fixedly away, toward a small window that showed no view but brick wall. “I imagine you don’t like this map,” he said.
“No,” she said immediately. “I much prefer the other one.”
The tapestry to the left, he’d never seen before. “Was this also at the estate?”
“Yes. Last century, French. But Miss Everleigh thinks it valuable in its own right. You don’t often see fairy tales as the subject of such pieces.” Lilah frowned at it. “She says it’s a fairy tale, anyway. It’s not one I’ve ever heard.”
He studied it. In the foreground, two young knights bowed—or groveled—at the foot of a king. In the upper left quadrant, Christian located their swords, abandoned in a distant mountain range, atop which sat a fearsome-looking dwarf. In the upper right quadrant, a grand castle stood in a verdant valley, overlooked by a third knight and a crowned queen. “It’s the tale of the Water of Life.” He glanced back to the king. “See the goblet? The king falls ill, and his three sons go out into the world, one by one, to find the cure.”
“Let me guess: the firstborn is evil, and the second is stupid, and only the youngest has the courage to outwit the monster.”
“No bravery in this tale. Only diplomacy. The first two sons are too vain and proud to reply to the greeting of the dwarf who guards the pass. But the third is courteous, for which the dwarf befriends him. He offers the young prince advice, and a few tools that save the day. The king is healed, and the prince ends up winning a foreign princess and a kingdom of his own.”
“That’s not a tale about diplomacy,” she said. “The moral is never to be too proud for friendship.” She slid him a brief, pointed look. “You never know when that friend might come in handy. So never turn up your nose at an offer of help.”
He let that rebuke pass in silence, for the argument was settled. “I always thought the moral of these tales was to know your place.”
Her laugh was unpleasantly sharp. “Yes, that sounds right, too.”
Did she imagine he had lied to her? That her past, her upbringing, mattered a damn? “The third born is humble due to his station,” he said evenly. “He acts selflessly. Whereas the firstborn fails because he acts from greed—wanting only his inheritance, without any sense of the duties that should properly drive him. And the second born, who should be noble, waging battle for his ideals, wants only the glory, and none of the blood.”
“So he wants to be a hero.”
“Yes.”
“Fitting for you, as a second born.”
He shrugged. “You know what I think on that subject.” And she should know, too, that he was the last man on earth who would attach importance to what others would think of her, should they learn of her history. Public perception meant nothing.
“Why?” she asked, her expression wan. “You are a hero in every way that counts. It’s gotten you the hand of a princess, hasn’t it?”
He sighed. She’d sent him a note of congratulation on his engagement. He had wondered—he wondered now—if she knew how deeply her courtesy sliced. How well she had mastered manners, which were, after all, only another weapon to those fluent in them. “In fairy tales,” he said, “the princess is almost always in disguise.”
Her smile was as sharp as her laughter had been. “And so was Miss Everleigh, until now. Everybody’s talking of it. How calm she seems. Why, she even smiles at the hostesses.”
“She smiled at you long before she returned to London. You’d melted her quite thoroughly, though you didn’t know it.” He gave her a real smile, genuinely amused by the thought. “In the fairy tales, you would be the hero who slayed the dragon.”
She crossed her arms. “Fat chance of that. I’m far from selfless.”
“You’d be the second born,” he said. “In the rare tales where that one wins. Fighting for your ideals.”
“Ideals!” She turned away, looking over the treasures on the tables. “Money, maybe. I would fight for that.”
“ ‘Better things,’ ” he quoted softly. “ ‘Beauty and honesty and honor.’ ”
She recognized her own words. Her face darkened as she turned back.
He did not like her reaction. The memory of the night she had spoken those words in his study, and then asked him to demand something of her . . . it lived in him like a piece of light. That it should bring such misery to her face was one of the more disquieting sights he’d ever seen, and God knew he had many to choose from.
He took a breath, thinking again of Susseby—the great grave where the house had stood. But the air smelled pure here. Clean, clear. Scented with that perfume that was not Pearson’s soap, but simply her skin, and nothing else.
She was staring at him, mouth trembling. “If you see me that way, then how . . .”
“It’s because I see you that way.” She had shown him how to be a hero. For her alone, he could be one. “I should go,” he said reluctantly.
She looked back to the tapestry, her frown less a scowl than a fight for composure. “Yes. You know the way out, Lord Palmer.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The night was unseasonably cold. As Lilah wrenched open the door to the back passage, she shivered. Her evening gown was cut low across her bosom and left her arms entirely bare. When she had ordered this scarlet silk, and paid dearly for the seamstress to line the skirt’s brocade panels with iridescent beading, she had envisioned the liveliness of the night she would wear it—the attention she would gather, gentlemen admiring her.
She had not envisioned skulking in wait of Nick.
“Hurry,” she said as he appeared in the alley. “There are guards posted.”
Nick stepped inside, kicking the door shut with one polished shoe. In silence, she helped him strip off, hanging his coat and scarf on a nearby hook, tucking his hat out of sight behind a pile of umbrellas.
The pile tipped. She caught them before they could clatter to the floor.
“Steady, now,” he murmured.
“Yes.” She took a deep breath. Dim strains of music filtered through the ceiling, the party well under way now. She picked up a brush and handed it to Nick. “Quickly.”
People who came through the front door employed footmen to knock the dust from their hems. The rest of the world did it for themselves. Nick brushed down his sleeves, then his trouser cuffs. “Aye?”
She looked him over in the dim light. The dark dress coat was cut expertly; he used a first-rate tailor. He’d stripped off his rings, confining his glitter to gold sleeve links and a gold watch chain that snaked, gleaming, over his black waistcoat. “Yes,” she said. Nobody upstairs would look twice at him. Or—no, certainly they would look. He cut a handsome figure even when rumpled, and formal wear suited him. He’d even cut his hair.
She could not resist one last attempt to change his mind. “Are you certain there’s nothing else you want of me? Something—”
“Certain as the sunrise.” He took her arm in a firm, steadying grip. “Lead on, Lily.”
She balked. “Miss Marshall. You cannot slip up here, Nick.”
His glittering gray eyes narrowed. “Mind whom you speak to. Miss Marshall.”
She took another deep breath. “Right.” Her uncle did not make mistakes. She could count on him for that.
She led him up the servant’s stair, taking care to keep her sweeping train out of his path. What he hoped to gain by mixing with the crowd, she had no idea. But he’d wanted introductions to certain clients of the auction rooms—one of the men whose letters she’d stolen, and a few others, besides. She’d had no idea how to arrange it until this party had been announced.
As they crested the stair, the music grew distinct. Young Pete had hired a full orchestra to regale the crowd—three hundred of London’s brightest lights
assembled in record haste to celebrate the engagement of the year. She opened a door concealed by an arras, and Nick slipped past her.
She waited a minute longer before stepping out. He’d already disappeared, a wolf loose in the henhouse. Amazing that a trail of feathers and blood did not mark his passage.
“Lilah!” Lavender Ames swept up, grabbing her elbow. “There you are. I was looking everywhere. What kept you?”
Vinnie was too shrewd for Lilah’s comfort. She’d sensed something amiss over these last few days. It was only friendly concern that motivated her. “Too much champagne while dressing,” Lilah answered. “I’m a bit dizzy.”
“Well, you know the cure for that—another glass!” Laughing, Vinnie pulled her down the hall, into the refreshment room. A grand banquet would be laid at one o’clock; until then, guests grazed on platters of oranges and cakes, tiny French bonbons, and shrimp on ice. The staff had worked overtime, planning in days what usually required weeks.
Lilah accepted a glass of wine and then drifted away from Vinnie to the archway that opened into the ballroom. The scene looked familiar from a dozen other parties at Everleigh’s: the men in uniform black; the blondes in pastel tulle and lace, the brunettes in richer, vivid hues. If only she could remember how she usually felt at such events—how she comported herself; how she smiled. She felt as wooden as a puppet tonight.
It took a minute to spot Catherine Everleigh. She stood at the top of the room beside her new fiancé, resplendent in an emerald gown, receiving compliments from the dozen guests encircling them.
Naturally, Palmer lifted his eyes just as Lilah allowed her glance to shift to him.
Her heart constricted as they stared at each other. Could he divine, by her face, the tumult battling through her? In its physical force, unhappiness was not so different than desire. But it weighed far more heavily, a leaden pressure in her chest. Of late, breathing seemed the trick to master—to say nothing of getting out of bed in the morning, knowing she must report to Miss Everleigh, who seemed unusually peaceful and gentle-tempered.
Everyone had remarked on the change—even Susie Snow, whom Miss Everleigh had greeted in passing yesterday. “Love is truly a power,” Susie had said last night, rolling her eyes as she flopped into bed.
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