Another footman leaned over the table and set a flaming candelabra in its center, turned with another for the table beside theirs, and left on quiet feet. Rainier blinked against the sudden flush of light as their previously dark corner blazed brightly. The fresh candles lit Deborah’s lovely dimples, glinted from her coiled brown curls, and flashed with her eyes when she glanced aside at Anson. “Everyone knows about the ball,” she continued to him directly, “so that doesn’t count as news.”
He huffed, little grin never slipping. “As if I needed to be told that.”
If Rainier hadn’t known they always talked in such a casual manner, he’d have accused them of flirting. But even Hortense had ceased prodding the scandal sheets with that tidbit; Deborah and Anson’s friendship and playfulness was too much common knowledge to invite speculation, much less ink.
A quiet, controlled voice from across the table interrupted the bantering. “According to the broadsheets, Romeo and Juliet is coming to the Theatre Royal.”
Rainier blinked. The beautiful Miss Busche, as he’d started thinking of her, showed stunningly in the brightened candlelight. The ends of her upswept blond hair dangled and brushed her shoulders, a rich contrast to the dark eyes which had so mesmerized him, and they glowed luminous and large, as bright as the flames. Hortense’s description of the young lady’s bosom proved accurate, but even such sultry shapeliness faded in comparison to the simple beauty of her slender neck, the unstudied grace of her turning head. Something stirred within him. Had he ever seen a more gorgeous woman?
As a man, he certainly couldn’t blame Cumberland for noticing her. But as a gentleman, he’d not permit a rake to spoil her brilliant purity. Had the duke set his mind on Miss Busche? Surely not in any coarse manner, and the strange, tight emotion stirring in his chest rumbled a growl at the thought.
“Romeo and Juliet.” Deborah sighed, much too dramatically, and handed Miss Busche the shuffled and cut deck. “Dear sweet Miss Busche, if you put together a party, do please invite me. Anson will let us use his box, won’t you?”
As Miss Busche began dealing, Anson glanced at Rainier. “Those blasted star-crossed lovers. Not them again.”
“Oh, really, Anson,” Deborah said.
“Of course you can use the box, Miss Kringle. You can’t imagine I’d have any use for it that evening.”
Rainier hid a smile. Why Anson kept a theater box when he went so rarely remained a perennial Mayfair mystery and joke. Perhaps it was only intended as another method of teasing Deborah. Considering Anson’s bluff, hearty personality, though, that possibility seemed rather subtle. It had taken forever for him to lose his adolescent boorishness, but thankfully he hadn’t pranced at a ball since the Kringles’ last Christmas Eve extravaganza.
“Oh, but you must come, too,” Deborah said.
Anson huffed again. “Don’t you think it’s a bit late for me to try fooling anyone on that score?”
Across the table, Miss Busche’s attention followed the bantering with quick glances from side to side. The candlelight reflected from her eyes, making their actual color impossible to determine, possibly deep brown, possibly blue, and possibly a true black. Her hands, firm and sure, dealt the cards with practiced ease. When she glanced up and noticed Rainier’s gaze on her, she widened her eyes at the two friends, as if inviting him to laugh at their antics with her. The smile he’d fought earlier broke free. She’d made an attractive first impression; now she was making an appealing second one.
He blinked at the thought. Attractive. Appealing. Yes. Yes, she was. But at heart, was she any different from Hortense and Lucia? Did she seek for anything beyond position, power, money? Was her natural elegance bespoiled by avarice, and was the purity he’d glimpsed truly there or merely a product of his yearning imagination? For that matter, could she even play cards? He’d have to be careful not to bestow his esteem before determining exactly what motivated this beauty.
Rainier dragged his gaze aside and forced himself to focus on Anson’s good-humored grimace. “You must be there, Anson. If it’s your box, then you’re the host.”
Anson’s grimace deepened, but his grin did, too. “Arrange it for November, then, and Miss Busche must promise to stick an elbow in me should I start to snore.”
Across the table, those dark eyes widened again, this time as if alarmed. Very deliberately she dealt the last card to one side and face-up: the five of diamonds, signifying the trumping suit.
A sniff from Deborah as she played the ace of spades to the table’s center. “Miss Busche won’t have to. I’ll just stuff a glove in your mouth.”
She would, too, or at least she’d done so in the past. Rainier tossed down the two of spades — his hand sorted more into hearts and clubs, more’s the pity, leaving him weak in possible trumps — and George the four. It was too much to hope that Miss Busche would hold no spades, so she’d have to follow suit and no card she could play would top Deborah’s ace. Well, he’d expected to lose, but giving up the first trick to Deborah, of all players, was hard. Of all the women in his acquaintance, only Lady Gower properly counted cards and played to win; Deborah certainly didn’t because she never stopped chattering.
Then Miss Busche — beautiful, glowing, appealing Miss Busche — slid the five of diamonds atop the trick, trumping and taking it. Such a simple move, but so effective. The final, face-up card of course belonged to the dealer, but she played last and could have held that card for later, tossing down a low-ranking heart or club simply to be rid of it. And it seemed she indeed held no spades at all, or she couldn’t have played the trump.
As Miss Busche scooped the trick to her side of the table, Anson popped his eyebrows and Deborah whined. One candle guttered and sent shadows darting across the polished wood. Rainier’s pulse seemed to dance in rhythm with it. Perhaps he’d lucked out here at Lady Gower’s card party, in more ways than one.
“Mr. Anson,” Miss Busche said as she played the six of hearts, “I cannot believe you’re serious. How on earth could you sleep through one of the most exquisite romances in dramatic literature?”
It felt as if little zephyrs of wind tickled over Rainier’s skin. Now that she’d said more than one sentence — blast Anson and Deborah for hogging the conversation — now that he’d actually heard her sustained voice, its strong, educated rhythm and timbre matched her physical form for beauty. Miss Busche’s singing had to be superb; even Hortense had admitted that to be so. And not only had she brought up a subject he found intensely interesting, she’d also played the next trick to his strongest suit.
Anson rolled his eyes. “For precisely that reason: it’s a romance.”
After such a déclassé remark, Rainier felt no guilt at all when he took that trick, and the next, and Miss Busche the one after that. Only then did Deborah’s eyes widen in alarm as she bent over her hand, letting the bantering go. The conversation continued, but Rainier had no need to praise Shakespeare’s play; Miss Busche defended the doomed lovers to Anson as well as he could. And she did so without losing the flow of play. Indeed, she seemed to have an extra sense that silently divined who held what cards, and she trumped and finessed, both directly and indirectly, with great skill. Of course they lost a few tricks; that was bound to happen. But they didn’t lose many, and his grin became harder and harder to fight.
“Very well, Miss Busche,” Anson finally said, when only four plays remained to the hand. “Not only are you whipping us soundly at whist, you’ve convinced me that Romeo and Juliet represents the finest poetry ever produced by anyone.” His glance down at his cards was rueful. “That probably won’t change the fact that I’ll sleep through it.”
Miss Busche smiled. Her dark eyes glinted in the candlelight, a harder, satisfied edge to her expression as she set her remaining cards face-up on the table. “And I believe the remaining tricks must be ours.”
A quick glance at his own cards, a totting up of suits and cards played in his memory, and Rainier realized her assessment was accurate:
their opponents could have no cards remaining that would top theirs. Throughout the hand, throughout the bantering and her earnest persuasion, she’d remembered each card that had been played and had calculated which ones hadn’t yet appeared. She glowed with satisfaction and triumph, putting the candles to shame.
They’d won. The competitor in him roared, victorious. And as Anson and Deborah pouted and complained, all Rainier could do was stare in awe at the glorious beauty across the table.
He’d partner her at cards any time.
Chapter Five
Saturday, October 16, 1813
Last evening had been so wonderful that Coralie simply couldn’t get the memories out of her head. The gentle smile when he’d greeted her, the deliberate curl of his lip, the perceptive way he’d eyed her as the game had progressed… each recollection aroused a bubble of delight within her, as if she’d swallowed mouthfuls of happiness and they popped deliciously in her stomach. She’d gone to bed rapturous and stayed awake for hours, hugging her pillows and smiling into the dark.
Such an overindulgence of memories, unfortunately, left her hung over the next morning and by dinnertime she wished she’d never gone to Lady Gower’s card party. Yes, he’d smiled at her, but any proper gentleman would do the same. What had he really been thinking of her? Had that deliberately curling lip been approving or mocking? If he truly possessed such perception, then surely he must have seen through her posing — deliberately throwing his own thoughts back at him, for shame! — and written her off as a silly chit, no matter how many hands they’d won.
By suppertime, it was worse. By then, she’d managed to stop thinking of Mr. Rainier, but instead her thoughts turned on their own toward that vexing duke.
Coralie folded her napkin and set it beside her plate. The dining room’s silence had remained unbroken throughout the meal, save the usual instructions to the servants. All it would have taken was a stimulating conversation to distract her; even a litany of complaints from her brother Franklin, product of an unsatisfactory day, would have helped her shake off the spell. But no, all she’d heard for the last half hour was the clinking of her own silverware. As a result, the Duke of Cumberland had haunted her thoughts from sitting down to standing up.
He’d stared at her in the coffee house as if he’d intended taking her apart, eating her alive, and ravishing whatever remained, like the rake his disreputable reputation claimed him to be. There’d been no mocking edge to his smile, nothing but honest appraisal and approval, but he’d awarded her such a generous quantity of those opinions that she’d felt overwhelmed. Then clearly he’d followed Mrs. Lacey and her across Fleet Street. No more than a few minutes had transpired between the two events. And yet at the linen-draper’s, he’d behaved completely differently. He’d displayed nothing but courtesy, his stare had vanished, and he’d been a proper gentleman.
What could possibly have changed him so in the space of time it had taken to cross the street?
Not to mention he’d demonstrated the most extraordinary taste in fabrics. She’d never have looked at that gold crepe if he hadn’t displayed it in just that manner. She’d certainly never have purchased it. What on earth would she use it for? But he’d unfurled the crepe from the bolt, allowing it to flow down in a molten sheet and pool on the counter, and the perfect, perfectly beautiful moment had stopped her breath.
So rarely did such moments occur, Romantic moments of absolute beauty and perfection, when time seemed to slow and drift past like crystal water in a sweep without seconds. When beauty seemed to come alive with a vital spark, as described by Dr. Mesmer, to live outside the object expressing it, to capture and enslave her to itself. When beauty defined the divine, rather than vice versâ.
When she truly felt alive.
As opposed to…
Franklin’s chair at the table’s head sat empty. He’d been called away before the soup; another imperative message from Whitehall, it seemed, that couldn’t wait until the meal’s end. Mrs. Lacey kept to her bed with clear broth and toast, resting after their previous evening out. And so on either hand, the white cloth stretched away in refined loneliness. Her parents’ portraits, Papa forbidding and stern, Mama with a tiny Mona Lisa smile, had watched her with more pity than Severidge, the butler, as he’d carved the mutton.
After such a day, a lonely supper just seemed too much to bear. She made it a rule not to interrupt her brother while he worked, certainly not on the evenings when the Minister sent reports for his attention. But after leaving the table, Coralie found her footsteps pausing outside the study’s open door, and she peered in. On the hearth, the fire flared and sparks flew upward, as if someone had just fed it a morsel of foolscap. The fireplace’s dark travertine legs, detail panel, and header were inlaid with marble in several colors, forming a Grecian key pattern that led the eye from floor to mantel, across and back down again, and as usual Coralie let it absorb her.
A sudden scraping sound; a flash of movement, hard and determined. Her brother Franklin paced past, waving a sheet of paper and reciting something inaudible in a high monotone, as if dictating. A pen scratched in the background, the secretary out of sight at the side table but scribbling away. The pacing stopped in front of the far bookshelves; a moment later, the scratching pen paused, too. Franklin scrubbed a hand through his disheveled hair. “No, strike that, Stuart. What did he say about—” He turned, saw her, and stopped.
All the energy seemed to drain from him. “Coralie.”
And sudden shame engulfed her. He worked so hard, trying to help win the war, and she had no business interrupting him. But her feet refused to let her move away. She managed a smile. “Franklin. Severidge brought your supper?”
“Yes.” He crumpled the paper. “Thank you.”
She couldn’t ask. It was too selfish, too childish. If he’d worked through supper, then his current project, whatever it was, would keep him too busy for the Foresters’ ball, on the Friday six days hence. Her next smile felt more natural. “Well, then. Good night.”
“Coralie, wait.”
He stood within arm’s reach when she turned. But he didn’t reach, not even to tug her curls the way he used to. “Is there anything…?”
Anyone, he meant. Was there anyone she needed to apprise him of, he wished to know. He always asked, on the occasions when she brought herself to his notice; someday she’d have something positive to report. So long as he didn’t then transcribe the news in a dispatch to the War Office: Miss Coralie Busche lays siege to Mr. X’s heart and captures his hand. Wedding details to follow.
No, nothing to report. Just because she’d played whist with the man of her dreams and been chased down Fleet Street by a rake — well, neither incident necessarily meant anything. She restrained an eye roll and shook her head.
His mustache twitched as if he’d read her mischievous thought but was determined not to react. When had he become so serious, so wistful? He’d always been seven years her senior, of course, but he’d used to drop at least some of that stuff and nonsense so’s they could run and play together. “If you like, I can send ’round to Lady de Lisle. You know she’d be happy for you to join her party for the Foresters’ ball.”
Lady de Lisle’s party. Oh, dear. Coralie’s heart stopped. A splendidly respectable woman, Lady de Lisle, and a model of good breeding and decorum. Perhaps that was how she’d become the de facto substitute chaperone for all the young ladies of their set: parents and guardians had no doubts their girls would go to the entertainment in question, behave themselves in an appropriate manner, and return at a proper hour. They’d have no choice, because Lady de Lisle would tolerate no silliness in public, no matter what happened behind the closed doors of her Berkeley Square town home.
But at Lady Gower’s rout last month, Coralie had overheard two young men of the beau monde making some off-color remarks regarding the good lady’s harem, as if the girls weren’t her charges but her employees. To be counted as one of them…
Franklin’s
mustache quivered again. She’d stood and stared at him for too long; her dismay must have shown in her expression and she’d hurt him. Really, it was a simple matter. Her choice was to stay home or swallow her pride, and staying home held no attractions worth considering. She’d not have to remain with the harem at all times, after all; she could slip away if she exercised a modicum of discretion. And if she never attended entertainments, then she’d never be in Mr. Rainier’s company again, never overhear the workings of his fascinating mind, and he’d never have the opportunity of asking her to dance.
Someday it might happen. Truly.
Besides, Franklin had remembered the event, despite his concentration upon those reports. She was no more than a distraction. But he’d remembered, and that was worth more than he’d ever know. It deserved her gratitude, not scorn. And perhaps he didn’t know how the fashionable mocked those who attended entertainments with that good lady.
“That would be very kind, Franklin. You know I try not to interrupt your work—” No, she’d not babble. Her pride might require repairs after she once again became a member of Lady de Lisle’s harem. But she’d not inflict further damage to the wretched thing through her own unguarded behavior.
Franklin huffed. “You never do interrupt me, Coralie, even though you’ve as much right as the Minister, if not more. I’ll send a note ’round in the morning. Good night, now.”
And then Franklin paused. His dark eyes, so like her own, watched her as if unhappy with what he saw. Then he leaned forward, a single swift motion she was too surprised to avoid. His mustache tickled her cheek a moment before he pressed a kiss there.
“Sleep well, dear.” He turned and ducked back into the study. “Where were we, Stuart? The letter, right—”
Shenanigans in Berkeley Square Page 4