by Kate Moore
The oversized sofa was made to hold him. He lay on his back in his black evening trousers and white shirt, his cloak over him, one arm across the cloak. He was shoeless, and the black silk stockings on his long, elegant feet were shredded and streaked with dirt and blood. Spatters of blood dotted the linen of his shirt at the open collar.
A night’s growth of beard shadowed his jaw, and a purple bruise the size of a thrush egg swelled there. He had plainly been in a fight, though where and how he’d lost his shoes in the fray, Emily could not imagine. He was deeply asleep. When he woke, she suspected he’d be in need of a saline draft for the aches.
She pulled up a chair. She meant to get answers to her questions about his sudden appearance in London, his hasty engagement to her, his interest in Lady Ravenhurst, and his habit of provoking chaos. But first she could really look at him without the cool front he showed to her or the imbecilic pose he wore in society.
He moaned, stretched, and opened one eye briefly.
“Good morning. I imagine your aches and pains are making themselves known.”
His eyes opened. “You.” The word was a dry croak. He swallowed. “How...”
“Roz and Phil are my family, you know.” Emily stood and crossed the room to ring the bell. “Tell me what you need.”
He groaned.
“Something cold and wet?” she asked.
She heard a vaguely affirmative mumble and sent the wide-eyed footman who answered the bell for a few items she thought would be helpful.
She settled beside him again. He opened his eyes. “I missed our ride.”
“And sent no message.”
“My apologies.”
“I’m curious to know how you lost your shoes.” She did not ask him if he’d won the fight.
His crooked mouth quirked slightly in what might have been a smile. “You’re curious about more than that.”
“Well yes, I am. As your fiancée, a position which, by the way, seems to require a lot of looking the other way while you do whatever it is you really came to London to do, I’d like to know what, besides a spectacular bosom and an idiot husband, draws you to Lady Ravenhurst.”
He laughed lightly, which made him wince and press his hand to his ribs. He swung his feet to the floor and pushed himself up. The cloak slipped from his shoulders. His shirt hung loose and open at the throat and cuffs. He smelled of warm linen and himself. He took a moment to steady himself, his hands gripping the edge of the sofa. He seemed to have all his teeth, and his nose looked as straight and perfect as it had the day before.
All Emily’s questions rushed in on her. How had he come by his imperfect mouth and his indifference to opinion? What disaster had left him under his aunt’s dominion while still a boy?
The footman returned with the tray Emily had requested, and she occupied herself setting it down on a table near the green sofa. “Tankard or saline draft?” she asked.
“Tankard.”
“Was Phil part of this melee?” she asked.
Lynley took a swallow of the ale. She watched his throat work, surprised at her interest in a part of him usually swathed in linen. “I owe him. He broke it up.”
“And where were you? There are parts of London where unaccompanied gentlemen should never go.”
“We went to a club.”
“What sort of a club?” The reputable clubs gentlemen frequented were in the most fashionable neighborhoods, hardly dangerous territory.
“Exclusive gaming establishment. I was set upon walking home.”
Emily thought he had bigger holes in his story than in his stockings. Going gaming with Phil, the least likely gentleman to go gaming on the sly or to spend the small hours of the night apart from his wife.
“Was Lady Ravenhurst there?” Her voice sounded small to her.
Lynley choked a little on the ale and recovered. “She was.” He set the tankard aside. “Do you disapprove?”
It was not the question Emily expected. Lynley sat unmoving, his gaze fixed on his feet in the ruined stockings, waiting for her judgment. “Like your aunt, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“No.” She meant it. What she liked about him were the outrageous, impulsive things he did without regard to opinion. Well, that, and his person. He was a very...presentable gentleman. And he seemed in need of...a sympathetic touch. She jumped up and strode to the window.
“But I want to know why you engaged yourself to me in the midst of doing whatever it is you really came to London to do. What’s my part in all this?”
“Ah,” he said.
“Need time to collect your thoughts?” she asked. She took hold of the drapery cord and wound it around her hand. The idea that he was some sort of spy had taken hold of her mind. He’d dismissed the suggestion before, but now she meant to press him. “You are pursuing something? What? Missing government papers? Isn’t that a job for”—she yanked the cord, sending a flood of bright light into the room—“a Runner or an agent or what, a spy?”
She stood blinking in the eye-watering sunlight, trying to disentangle the cord around her fingers, when she felt him come up behind her. He took hold of her shoulders and turned her to face him, pulling her back toward the sofa. She shook her arm to free it of the cord and stumbled, and his arms came around her, and they tumbled down onto the sofa. He winced, but he didn’t let go.
She lay sprawled on top of him in a most unladylike awkwardness, her ear pressed to his beating heart, her legs tangled with his. She should push away, but his hand cupped her head and held her still. Under the thin lawn of his shirt, muscle and bone swelled and dipped. She rested her palm against his ribs and spread her fingers. He flinched even from her light touch.
“I have no lover’s interest in Lady Ravenhurst,” he said. His voice cracked as he spoke.
Emily lifted her head to meet his gaze, and tried to read the expression in his dark eyes.
* * * *
For a moment Lynley thought she might kiss him. His head swam with the scent of her, a piercing sweetness like the walled gardens of Jerez at night. Then he recognized the energy pulsing in her.
“You’re thinking,” he accused.
“Of course, I am. If you are not mooning over Lady Ravenhurst, then truly you are doing something else.”
While his body absorbed with every nerve ending the sweet sensation of Emily Radstock lying upon him, apparently she was unaffected. “What if I can’t tell you what that something is?”
A little furrow appeared between her brows. “Then how am I to help you?”
“Are you going to help?”
“Haven’t I already? Your first scheme would never have succeeded without the distraction I provided.” She lifted her hand from his ribs. “Help me up. I don’t want to inflict any more damage on your person.”
He put his hands to her waist and shifted her to a spot on the sofa beside him. She jumped up at once.
“Saline draft?”
He accepted the cup she offered, frowned at it, and tossed it down. She was smart. She knew London society more intimately than he did. And she was not faint of heart. “What are you willing to do to help?”
“Do you mean like leaping from a battlement or hiding with a dead man in his shroud?” She took the seat facing him. Her insubstantial gown was made of muslin trimmed with ribbon as green and golden as her eyes. He could not look away from the merry gleam of relish in those eyes.
“More like observing closely, listening to talk that you’re not meant to hear, and creating distractions.”
“No visits to noxious prisons or encounters with armed villains?” she asked.
“I can’t promise.” Maybe the saline solution was working. The day seemed brighter and his aches less noticeable.
“What can you tell me?”
“A guest at Lady Ravenhurst’s party lef
t with some gloves in his pocket, the gloves in which I found one of Lord Ravenhurst’s missing papers. That guest went directly to the club where Phil and I went last night.”
“So you went to see the place?”
“To see who meets whom there.”
“You think someone from fashionable society is guilty of giving away British information? To whom?”
“Russian agents. There was a fellow, a Count Malikov. Did you ever meet him?”
“Of course. He went everywhere. He was too perfectly amiable for me. I thought he must be the sort who would stab you in the back if he saw a chance.”
“He was. He also had a group of informants feeding him documents, some of whom apparently remain active.”
“Where is Malikov now?”
“In a cell. Not talking, apparently. Waiting for his government to extricate him.”
“So, if someone has stolen papers for Malikov, what does he do?”
“Gets desperate. Tries to find another taker for the papers. Makes a mistake.”
She fell silent, studying the items on the tray. “A person with stolen papers can’t exactly hawk them like a pie seller with his cart. You’ve already thought of that, haven’t you?”
He nodded. “The holder of the papers is likely to go where he might be approached by someone who wants them, someone in the spy ring who has remained in the background so far, letting Malikov be known, but keeping his own identity hidden.”
“But in London that could be anywhere. The park, a club, a party...” A thought seemed to strike her. She stood abruptly and walked to the window, staring out at the street. He waited for her to speak. “So you engaged yourself to me so that you could be in all those places, looking about, without anyone suspecting you of being a...spy.”
The day had advanced. There was enough noise from the street, the clatter of carriages and hooves and the shouts of passersby to make it hard to catch the tone of her voice. He stood carefully, reminding himself that nothing had changed in two days. She was a delightful armful, but he had no interest in women who dreamed of happily ever after. The point of the speech he’d overheard her make in this room was that she did not really want to marry. She’d amused him with her fierceness, and he’d sympathized with her desire not to be managed by her relations. The engagement was made to suit them both. And it still could. If he let her in on the work, maybe he would find himself less distracted by her.
He came up behind her and rested his hands on her shoulders. “And now,” he said, “we’ll catch a spy together.”
She turned and faced him, stepping back from his light hold on her shoulders. “As...partners,” she said.
“Partners,” he replied. Looking into the bright sun, he could not read her expression.
She stepped around him. He extended a hand, but she was already out of reach. “Good. I’ll look at my cards of invitation. I think our next event must be a large party.”
“Em—”
She opened the door, and there stood Phil, looking from one to the other of them.
“Oh, hello, Em,” he said. “Roz is up. Did you come to see her?”
“Yes,” she said, and was gone.
Chapter Ten
There is an ancient duty of hospitality that falls on those members of society blessed by fortune with large estates and grand edifices. Does Lady Castlewood possess a ballroom sufficiently large that three dozen couples or more may stand up at a time? Inevitably, Lady Castlewood feels her duty to send cards of invitation. Perhaps, over time, her ball becomes one of the highlights of the Season, anticipated by all. While this writer advises the husband hunter not to disdain the small dinner party, should the husband hunter receive an invitation to Lady Castlewood’s ball, there can be only one response. Go!
—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London
Emily found Roz sitting up in bed in a pretty rose silk wrapper, sipping her morning chocolate, her black and white spaniel curled at her feet, everything cozy and soft. The dog thumped her tail on the blue coverlet in greeting, and Emily rubbed the silky ears.
Roz was just what Emily’s spirits needed after her conversation with Lynley had brought her back to earth with a jarring bump. “You look very pretty,” she told her sister.
Roz’s expression turned wistful. “Thank you. One doesn’t feel quite pretty, you know. How was the opera, Em?”
“You would have liked it, Roz. The princess’s attendants cavorted in harem pants throughout the evening.”
Roz sighed. “I do miss dancing.”
“Longing for a quadrille or a waltz?”
“I am. It’s nearly time for Lady Vange’s grand ball. I’ve gone every year since my come out until now.”
“Lady Vange’s party? I’d forgotten it.” Emily had gone to the grand affair twice before she’d abandoned husband hunting. She and Roz thought so differently about large parties. “Isn’t Lady Vange’s son Lord Hazelwood, the one who was...”
“Disgraced and disinherited?” Roz nodded and put down her chocolate. “But I read in the papers that he’s recently married a respectable girl, so perhaps his family will forgive him.”
Emily lifted the chocolate tray from Roz’s bed and sank into a soft blue velvet armchair. She did not remember seeing the Vange invitation in the cards at home, but she would look. “It’s a big party, isn’t it?” Exactly the sort of affair she had avoided for years, but it would be the perfect event for spy hunting.
“Quite. Near four hundred guests. The dancing starts at eleven, and the supper goes on from two to near morning, with seating for sixty guests at a time. You and Lynley could go if he—” She broke off.
“You needn’t conceal anything from me, Roz. I saw him this morning. He seems to be more or less in one piece, thanks to Phil apparently.”
“I’m glad. Phil felt there was something wrong about that club. That’s why he went back.”
Emily glanced round the room decorated with her sister’s usual blue and gold touches, but there were signs of Phil, too, in the dark, masculine wood of a pair of dressers and in a painting of horses and dogs gathering on a hunt morning. It was a shared space of two lives blended, not like the partnership to which she and Lynley had agreed.
“Em?” Roz recalled her to the present. “Are you sure you want to go on with your engagement?”
Emily managed a nod. “Why do you ask?”
“You look so serious is all.”
“Me? Serious? Never. You are the one who is seriously missing dancing and feeling that you’ve lost your prettiness. I should be the concerned sister.”
“I do miss going about. There is such a round of paying calls when one first marries. I suppose I got in the habit of it, and now...now I wait for people to call on me. I don’t blame them for not coming, of course. I seem unable to speak of anything except the baby, as if no other subject exists. I’m sure most people would rather talk of other things.”
“Roz, everyone has a favorite subject. Papa will talk for hours of porticoes, pillars, and staircases if you let him, and who is that young man who only speaks of his dogs?”
“Oh, Eversley.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’ve not stopped going out, have you?”
“Phil takes me for drives, and we walk a little, out of the way of everyone’s notice. I look rather like your beloved Chunee.”
“You do not.”
Roz nodded solemnly. “I do. My gowns are tents as I refuse to wear those stays Doctor Collins recommends that put a squeeze on the baby.”
“Very sensible of you, but could you not wear one of Mama’s old high-waisted gowns?”
“Or stay home and wait for the Miss Throckmortons of the world to visit me.” She cast Emily a questioning look.
“It is Miss Throckmorton, I take it, who reports my every misstep?”
Roz nodd
ed. “Did you really dangle your ring for everyone in the park?”
“I did, but oh, Roz, it was only...”
“A little bit shocking?” Roz plucked at the blue coverlet. “Do you think it would be fun to be an opera dancer?”
“Fun? I should think it must be a most uncertain and very brief career.”
“But a career. I think that if I didn’t have Phil, I would like to be an opera dancer. You know, to be doing something.”
“Roz, you are doing something. You are making a child.”
“It’s just that being on my own so much, I realize that I’ve never done anything shocking, and now I probably never will.”
“That’s because you are a woman of calm good sense. Besides, you may grow up to be as outrageous as your elder sister.”
Roz laughed. “You are not so terribly outrageous, Em. Nothing like Lady Wingfield.”
“Did Miss Throckmorton report on her, too?”
Roz nodded. “Lady Wingfield invited everyone to see her four-poster bed. Each of the posts is a gilt statue of Hercules with all his male parts displayed.”
Emily laughed. “Then you are doomed to respectability, Roz. With your taste in furniture, you’ll never get yourself talked of that way.”
Roz laughed and threw off her coverlet. “Thank you, Em, you’ve cheered me.”
Emily stood. She was the one who should be doing the thanking. Fifteen minutes of her sister’s company had lifted her spirits. If her engagement had seemed briefly real, she had remembered in time that it was merely part of her scheme to take charge of her life. “Roz, if you want something to do, would you consider giving a small dinner for Lynley and me? For a few close friends.”
“Of course, and soon.” Roz gently cupped her round middle, holding her unborn child.
Chapter Eleven
In the mind of a young person, convention appears as the fossilized remains of a former age, as absurd as powdered wigs and beauty patches. Convention, our modern miss declares, is the enemy of feeling and worthy only of contempt. This writer must disagree. The conventions of a fourteen-week Season are no more to be disdained than the conventions of the fourteen-line sonnet. Like the genius of our island, the husband hunter must express depth of feeling and true sincerity within the bounds of convention.