Unmasked by the Marquess

by Cat Sebastian

  “This isn’t working,” she said, frustrated. Their bodies had fit together so seamlessly when they had kissed, but now it was a shambles. “I don’t know how to dance the lady’s part.”

  “Neither do I, I’m afraid.”

  As if he’d ever offer to dance the lady’s part. She made a dismissive sound and shook her head.

  “Try it like this.” He tugged her close again. They stood still, listening to the strains of a song they could barely hear, unable to work out the steps to a dance they shouldn’t have been attempting in the first place.

  She rose onto her toes and pressed a kiss to his cheek, before slipping away toward the ballroom.

  Chapter Nine

  When Charity was about ten, she went with the Selbys’ cook to the market at Alnwick. The cook wanted to buy a special cheese to tempt old Mr. Selby’s appetite, and she brought Charity so she wouldn’t have to carry her own parcels or do her own sums.

  Charity had never seen so many people in one place, or perhaps even cumulatively over the course of her short life. At Fenshawe there were a bare dozen people, even when the cook’s niece came from the village to help with the laundry. The tiny village church near Fenshawe might hold fifty people, and that was on Easter Sunday. At the dimly remembered parsonage, where she had been brought as a baby and kept until the vicar died, there had been scarcely anybody at all. She remembered quiet, dust, and the vicar’s patient lessons.

  Alnwick had been a revelation. All those people, loud and purposeful and fast-moving. She had never even dreamt of such a thing. Coins flashed in the sun, exchanged for mustard and apples and sharp new needles. She had clung to the cook’s apron, not out of fear of being lost, but so she wouldn’t be tempted to run off and join the throng.

  Looking back, she supposed there had been perhaps two hundred people present that day in the market square. But that was more people than Charity had conceived of existing in the entire world.

  That was how Louisa’s drawing room seemed on the day after Pembroke’s ball. It was a magnificent crush. There were, according to Keating, carriages all the way down the street. The ladies wore gowns the value of which Charity would not allow herself to calculate, the gentlemen had a degree of polish that Charity could never attempt to emulate, and they all had the unmistakable lightness of people who had never worried about where their next meals would come from.

  And they were all here for Louisa. Well, technically some of them left cards for Robert Selby, but they were here for Louisa and everybody knew it.

  After Charity fled from the garden, Alistair upheld the promise he made last month and stood up with Louisa, while Charity watched the news of Lord Pembroke’s dance with the beautiful Miss Selby ripple through the crowd.

  They made a completely unobjectionable pair: his rank and wealth matching her grace and beauty, his dark good looks contrasting pleasantly with her golden loveliness. “A striking couple,” the ladies murmured. “I dare say he’s done for,” the gentlemen jested.

  Charity had never been so jealous of another human being as she was that moment of Louisa. And she hated herself for it—to be jealous of Louisa was like being jealous of a field of daffodils. It simply made no logical sense. All the same, she felt almost sick at the sight of how they danced perfectly together—it was a minuet, nothing so intimate as a waltz, but still it happened, which was more than she could say of her own attempted dance with him.

  But at the same time, this was her own triumph. These whispers of curiosity, these sighs of admiration, they were all signs that their gamble hadn’t been for nothing. Louisa would be safe, protected, provided for. They had done it.

  Almost.

  First they had to entertain a swarm of ladies and gentlemen, a Northumberland village’s worth of people contained in one tatty drawing room. She caught Lord Gilbert’s eye and gave him an apologetic wave. It would be impossible for her to make her way through the crowd to talk to him.

  She loved it. She adored the hum of well-bred chatter, the lively banter, the press of people around her. Louisa sat prettily on the sofa, pouring tea—Keating was going to wear himself out carrying up all the hot water this gathering would require—and acting only vaguely surprised by the attention. Perfect.

  Charity was tempted to rub her hands together and cackle in the manner of a villain in a play.

  After that long-ago visit to the Alnwick market, she asked Robbie whether he had known that there were positively hundreds of people in Britain. She was helping him with all those verbs he could never seem to properly conjugate, and he had looked up at her with a curious tilt of his head.

  The next day he taught her to ride so she could get herself a bit farther than the borders of Fenshawe. “We’ll take a peek at the sheep-shearing over near Harbottle,” he had said, as if it were a perfectly reasonable suggestion. Indeed, the house was in a state of perpetual disarray due to the master being so ill, so nobody noticed the absence of the heir, a housemaid, and a pair of horses.

  They had been fast companions until the day he had sent her off to Cambridge. “I can’t leave, not when Daisy’s in foal. Besides, what’s the use of your knowing all those Latin verbs if you’re not going to university?” he had insisted, as if Charity were the one being annoyingly stubborn in suggesting that she instead stay at Fenshawe to sweep out the grates and beat the carpets.

  It had been the market day at Alnwick that had sealed her fate, she now realized. She had gotten a glimpse of the world and of the people in it. They were everywhere, laughing and working, and she could never be happy again at sleepy, isolated Fenshawe, no matter how much she loved the Selbys.

  And she had loved the Selbys. She had changed Louisa’s nappies, she had spoon-fed old Mr. Selby his last meal. She would never run out of tears for Robbie.

  Even if she hated every minute of this sham, she would have done it anyway if it meant Louisa would be taken care of. But she loved it. And by God, she was not going to feel guilty about the pleasure she was taking in this masquerade and all the freedom it afforded her.

  “Have you seen my brother?” Against the odds, Lord Gilbert had managed to reach her side.

  “No.” She raised her voice to be heard over the din. “I didn’t expect him, though.”

  “Really? After that dance, I’d have thought he would have nowhere else to be.”

  There was an edge to his voice, something faintly hostile and disapproving. It took Charity a mortified moment to realize that of course he was referring to Alistair’s dance with Louisa, not his waltz with Charity.

  “Oh, he would never allow himself to be one of a crowd,” she said lightly. But, come to think of it, why wasn’t he here? Not for Louisa, but for Charity herself? Surely he could have predicted what today would bring for Louisa and what it would mean for Charity. After the intimacy they had shared—she absolutely would not blush—did he not want to see her?

  Evidently he did not, and the realization was enough to dampen her joy at today’s success. He had likely woken up this morning and been overwhelmed with more kinds of shame than he even could identify.

  Shame was a luxury of the rich, as far as Charity could tell. Everybody else had to worry about getting food in a way that didn’t land them in a noose, but marquesses had time and pride to spare. She wondered what aspect of their connection he found most regrettable. Was it that she was a thief, a foundling, a former servant, a liar, or simply that she dressed as a man? Likely she was objectionable in ways she hadn’t even thought of yet.

  The knowledge of his shame shouldn’t bother her. Shame wasn’t contagious. His disapproval couldn’t make her think less of herself. Charity had always known that she wasn’t one of those blessed few who had the luxury of keeping their hands clean.

  But she hated being the dirt that soiled the Marquess of Pembroke.

  Alistair’s ancestors were not renowned for their exploits on the battlefield or in Parliament. The fact that there were still de Laceys owed more to their talent in avoidi
ng beheadings than it did to any greatness. While other noblemen were killing one another for power and proximity to the throne, the de Laceys were eloping, seducing, and scandalizing. Alistair’s grandfather and great-grandfather had had the knack of keeping their heads down and their breeches fastened, but they were the black sheep of the family; theirs were the lone portraits in the gallery at Broughton that didn’t exude a palpable air of dissipation.

  Considering this mainly unbroken lineage of womanizers and inebriates, it was especially galling that Alistair could not, for the life of him, figure out what to do about Robin.

  That was not quite true. He had many ideas of what he’d like to do with Robin, but not a single notion of how to bring those dreams to fruition without compromising everything he believed in.

  He did not want a mistress. He did not want to make a Mrs. Allenby out of his Robin. The very idea revolted him enough to nearly kill his desire, and the thought of siring a bastard on her made his blood run cold. On the other hand, the Marquess of Pembroke could not very well marry the likes of Charity Church. It was quite impossible. A housemaid turned impostor could never be the Marchioness of Pembroke. God forgive him for even formulating the thought.

  So he quite gave up on trying to find a solution, and instead determined to calmly explain to Robin that anything between them was utterly impossible. They could—must—be friends, but not the sort of friends who dance in the garden and grope one another. She was charming, she was lovely, and they would never touch one another again.

  As simple as that. When all else failed, he could still rely on his aptitude for self-denial.

  But first he had to find her. He considered paying a visit to her at home, but Gilbert had complained that the Selbys’ house was a veritable anthill of would-be suitors. He caught a glimpse of her riding in the park—not on his horse, he realized with a stab of irritation—but it was too crowded to do more than salute her from a distance.

  “Where the devil is Selby keeping himself?” he asked Gilbert one morning when the younger man had come for breakfast.

  “He has his hands full with Miss Selby and Amelia,” Gilbert responded in between bites of ham.

  “Amelia?” Alistair repeated, his fork poised halfway to his mouth.

  “Yes, our sister.” Gilbert slammed his own fork back onto the table. “You’ve heard of her?”

  “Don’t be absurd. I only want to know what Selby has to do with it.”

  “The Selbys and Amelia are friends, and they go about together, as friends do,” Gilbert explained, as if friendship were a concept that Alistair was too slow to comprehend.

  It wasn’t like Gilbert to be quite this testy, but Alistair didn’t know how to broach the topic. He was glad that Gilbert was here at all, and didn’t want to make a muddle of things the way he usually did with his brother.

  “He’ll be at Portia’s salon tonight, if you really want to see him,” Gilbert continued.

  By Portia he meant Mrs. Allenby, of course. Alistair had never set foot in her house, and few people had the temerity to mention her salon in his hearing. It was hardly respectable, packed with would-be revolutionaries and badly dressed poets, from what he gathered. But Gilbert looked strained to the breaking point—perhaps he had discovered that farming required actual knowledge, as well as manure and other unsavoriness—and Alistair didn’t want to irritate him any further. Their relationship was not as warm as it ought to be, he was realizing, and that was starting to feel like a loss. Moreover, it was starting to feel like his own fault.

  “Very well, then. I’ll go to the salon. I’ll pick you up in my carriage.” Alistair took a long sip of tea. “What does one wear to one of Mrs. Allenby’s salons? Is evening attire acceptable, or must I fashion a pair of sans-culottes?”

  Gilbert made a derisive noise, but Alistair could see the beginnings of a smile cutting through the gloom, so he kept on going. “Does one bring one’s own opium, or is there some sort of communal . . . I don’t know, tureen?” Now Gilbert was openly smiling, albeit sardonically. “Do the orgies commence promptly at eight, or—”

  “Stop, stop!” Gilbert laughed. He threw his napkin on the table and rose to his feet. “I’m leaving before you change your mind.”

  Victory. He had amused Gilbert out of his sullen mood, and better still, he was going to see Robin. The prospect seemed to make the light shafting through the windows all the brighter.

  They were drinking champagne while listening to a man in a velvet dinner coat read a poem about rats.

  “I think the rats are a metaphor,” Charity whispered.

  “Something to do with the Corn Laws, I gather,” Amelia mused.

  Charity was about to disagree but nearly yelped when her friend elbowed her in the ribs.

  “Over there,” Amelia whispered. “Look. By the door.”

  At first she thought she had hallucinated. The room was hot, and even though she hadn’t had much champagne, a drunken imagining seemed more likely than Alistair actually being present at Mrs. Allenby’s salon.

  “Oh God, just look at him,” she breathed, and received another jab in the ribs from Amelia. But how could she not admire the man? He was wearing one of his most uncompromisingly tailored coats in unrelieved black. His waistcoat was also black, his cravat a masterpiece of simplicity. She couldn’t see his breeches but knew they’d be perfectly fitted and spotless. He stood out like a beacon of gentlemanly correctness in this colorful gathering.

  She wanted to run her hands over every inch of him. And then she wanted to do the same thing with her tongue.

  God help her, but she was going to have to add a mania for subdued tailoring to her list of depravities.

  “Stop staring,” Amelia hissed.

  Charity didn’t stop. She didn’t care who caught her staring. That was one of the nice things about this sort of gathering. These people prided themselves on their raggedy manners, which Charity privately thought rather silly, but she’d gladly take advantage of the freedom it gave her.

  The freedom to stare at the Marquess of Pembroke like he was a roast dinner.

  And he was staring back, but not at her. He was regarding the motley assemblage as if he were at the zoo. How long before he pulled out his spectacles? Ah, there he went now, reaching into his pocket, polishing the lenses on his handkerchief, and coolly placing them onto the bridge of his nose. Over a dozen times she had seen him perform that same series of gestures, every movement dripping with hauteur and breeding and privilege, and she could watch him do it a million more times.

  “Stop it now.” Amelia pinched Charity’s leg. “Even if you don’t care about your own character, have some care for his. He’d die if he knew he was being ogled by a man in public, and in this house of all places.”

  Quite true. Alistair lived and died by his bloody reputation, and everybody knew it. So instead of staring, she would go over there and have a perfectly gentlemanly conversation with the man.

  Making her way across the room, she could tell the minute he noticed her. His mouth quirked into approximately one-sixteenth of a smile—you would need a protractor to be sure it had really happened—and his left eyebrow shot up as if to say, What in God’s name am I doing in this place?

  Charity could have asked him the same question, but she didn’t care what he was doing here, only that he was here at all. She went over to where he stood, not noticing who she had to squeeze past to get there.

  When she reached his side, he dipped his mouth close to her ear. “There’s a man over there with a cat inside his coat.”

  She could feel his breath against her skin and didn’t know how she was going to keep her composure. She kept her eyes focused on the poet at the front of the room, who had now lapsed into French. “They’re only people,” she whispered. “And clever ones, at that.” The man with the cat was some kind of astronomer.

  “At least you didn’t bring your sister.”

  That made her whip her head around to face him. “Yes, but your s
ister is right over there.” Really, she had had enough of his disdain for the Allenbys, especially after Amelia had shown such care for Alistair’s precious reputation. If Charity were lucky enough to have a sister she would do anything to keep her close, and here Alistair had three sisters he had hardly met and a brother he scarcely seemed to know.

  At first she thought he would take offense—hell, he was meant to—but he only set his mouth into a grim line for the merest instant.

  “I’m insufferably arrogant.” He brushed some imaginary dust from his sleeve. “Ask anyone.”

  She snorted. “Do you want me to introduce you to people?”

  “God, no,” he sniffed. “I’m not here for that.”

  “Are you here to mock and scoff, then?”

  “No, you daft brat, I’m here because I was on the horns of a dilemma. If I want to see you I have to either come to this den of vice or experience whatever circle of hell your drawing room is these days. Gilbert complains that you’re under siege by every bachelor in Mayfair.”

  He had come for her. He had brought himself to what had to be the last place in London he would choose to visit. And he had done it for her. She felt warmth spread through her body. “Why didn’t you send me a note? I would have come to you at Pembroke House.”

  She felt his shoulder jostle against hers. “I know you would, Robin.” His voice was a low rumble. “But I recalled the last time I sent for you, and didn’t want you to think you had been summoned to the headmaster’s office.”

  He hadn’t wanted her to worry. “So instead you stayed away for days? I didn’t know what to think.” She shifted her stance, causing the back of her hand to stroke the side of his thigh. Oh, there were a thousand ways two gentlemen could touch one another in public without drawing suspicion, and Charity intended to explore every one of them before the night was through.

  He caught her hand and squeezed it, keeping his eyes fixed on the poet. His grip around her fingers was strong, a warning, not a caress. She could feel his signet ring pressing into her skin, a reminder of who and what this man was.