“And so much nicer to join you ladies in here than to act polite in Polinsky’s presence. A cross between a peacock and a bantam rooster, is he not?” When Rubio imitated the way the other medium raked his hair back from his temples, Jemma laughed out loud.
But then the mystical man sat straighter…tuned in to voices they couldn’t hear. “He’s going to be sorry he took the bait,” Rubio murmured, as though no one sat around him. “It might well be his undoing.”
Maria smiled at Jemma and shrugged.
When they returned to the buffet to consider dessert, however, Yosef Polinsky was working his way around the long table. He flirted shamelessly with the ladies, entertained the guests with his account of searching for Jason while he performed tricks with the table service.
“Which hand holds your salt cellar, Mrs. Grumbaugh?” he queried playfully. “I bet you know! You’ve watched very closely.”
The chubby woman tapped his left hand. When he opened it, a loud gasp flew around the table: a delicate bracelet of emeralds and sapphires dangled between his fingers.
“My stars, Mr. Polinsky!” Esther protested. “How did you do that? I had no idea—”
“The hand is faster than the eye,” the magician quipped. “But I’ll repeat the trick, while you observe again. I am passing your salt cellar between my fists—”
“Don’t fall for that old shell game, Esther!” Across the table, Martha MacPherson scowled and stood up. “And why are you acting so amazed? Yosef gave me that bracelet weeks ago, when—”
“I beg your pardon, but you’re dead wrong!” Esther Grumbaugh smacked the table and then stood up so suddenly she nearly bumped heads with Polinsky. “My first husband, Leopold, gave me this pretty little piece after the birth of our daughter, Maggie!” To emphasize her point, she fastened the bracelet around her wrist and then shook it at the matron across the table.
Maria took Jemma by the shoulder to stop the girl from venturing across the room toward the desserts. As those around the table glanced quizzically at one another, they straightened, spoiling for a catfight.
“What do you say to that, Mr. Polinsky?” Lady MacPherson’s cheeks flamed with indignation. “After you left me—to pursue your next biddable chicken—I had time to ponder your pretty lies. And low and behold, I discovered that some of the boxes in my jewelry chest were empty! So one has to wonder—”
“Well, there’s no wondering about this!” At the other end of the table, Rowena Galsworthy dug through her reticule and then flashed a calling card. “Not that I’ve seen this pole myself, but we all know who’d be arrogant enough—cocky enough—to wear a jeweled ring around his thing!”
Her husband Reginald nearly choked. “Really, Rowe! This is not a proper topic—”
“As if anything about Polinsky is proper!” Colette Bentley, too, produced a calling card with the magician’s bejeweled member on it. “And how many of us received these special mementos of Lady Darington’s tea?”
Every woman at the table fiddled in her reticule, to hold up a small photograph of herself in a wicker chair, with Polinsky’s arm slung behind her as he grinned gleefully at the camera. The room rang with chatter as they compared the photographs, while their men exchanged suspicious scowls.
Wasn’t it interesting that while these ladies berated the magician in their midst, they all carried his photograph? Maria made a note to mention that in a future column…but when she saw Yosef edging toward the door, she strode over to detain him.
“Yes, Maria! We’ll not be letting that wily fox out of the henhouse just yet!” Meriweather Golding trip-trapped daintily across the parquet floor, her mission written all over her careworn face. “I wish I could say I’d cleverly arranged this moment of truth, but you, my friends, have saved me the effort—the humiliation—of confronting Mr. Polinsky myself!” She stopped in front of him, her fist on her hip. “If you’re returning jewelry to Esther, I’d like mine back, too!”
“So would I!”
“And would I!”
The magician didn’t miss a beat. “Ladies, I’m flabbergasted that you think I’d sink so low as to—”
“Lower than a snake’s belly! That’s how you’ve behaved, and how I felt after you deceived me!” their hostess cried. “I blamed it on a memory gone faulty with age, but you took me for a fool and I proved you right. Will you return what you’ve stolen, or shall I summon the police?”
Trapped between Maria and Mrs. Golding, with a roomful of witnesses, Polinsky held up his hands as though he’d walked into an invisible wall…or had been placed under arrest already. “I assure you I shall restore what is yours, dear ladies. If you’ll list what is missing, I shall return to my room for—”
“Do you have a room, sir? Or are you a guest of yet another unsuspecting hostess?” Rubio demanded from the doorway. His mane of glossy brown hair rendered his face godlike as he awaited the magician’s answer. “When I suspected your duplicity—your thievery, Polinsky—I went to the Yard, where I discovered a string of complaints from across the Continent. Heartbroken women who reported jewelry missing after you performed in their towns. Using three different names.”
As Rubio stepped forward, he narrowed his piercing eyes. “You’re not even Russian, are you, Joseph Pohl? And you didn’t intend to unpack your trunks after we docked today, did you?” he demanded. “Instead, you planned to leave London before a scene like this one exposed you for the shyster you are!”
The room rang with silence. To a woman, they all appeared stricken. A whimper escaped Dora Darington.
Maria felt genuinely sorry for Jason’s mother: even the feather on her jaunty yellow hat drooped with her dejection. While the other ladies appeared indignant yet vindicated, Lady Darington tried very hard not to betray her devastation. Behind Rubio, Jason and Jude appeared in the doorway: their taut expressions conveyed their disgust at the story they’d overheard.
“I ought to run you up a flagpole and hang you for what you’ve done,” Jason muttered. “I see no recourse but to escort you to jail—”
“I’ll take him. You have other matters to attend to, Lord Darington.” Rubio surveyed those at the table. “I’m sure Galsworthy and Fenwick will assist me.”
“Thank you, sir.” Jason sighed tiredly. “And thank you, Mrs. Golding, for this lovely homecoming surprise. However, our family has endured much distress these past few weeks, so we’ll be leaving now. Mother?”
As the two gentlemen rose to assist Rubio, and Jason went around the table for Dora, Meriweather Golding held up her hand for silence. She looked at Polinsky as though she might cry.
“I’m sorry it came to this, Yosef,” she said in a halting voice. Then she smiled bravely and dabbed at her eyes. “It was a small price to pay, losing jewelry my late husband gave me each time he took a new mistress. While you were here—while you entranced me with your voice and your passion—I felt young and attractive again. Alive and in love! I shall never regret that.”
All in the room were departing, but they stopped to look at their hostess. Martha MacPherson clapped her reticule shut. “There’s that, all right. You burned me good, Mr. Polinsky, but those missing gems held no shine compared to your jewels! You made me feel devastatingly beautiful when we were—”
“There won’t be another lover like Yosef Polinsky. Might as well live out the rest of my days in a convent.” Esther Grumbaugh sighed over her photograph and then slipped it into the pocket of her flowing skirt.
Maria yearned to hear more midnight confessions; to ponder the magic this chameleon worked with that wand pictured on his business cards. Miss Crimson’s mind was spinning out phrases that would shock and delight her readers, even if Polinsky was the only character she named in this drama.
Jason, however, took his mother firmly by the shoulders. “Again, my thanks to all of you for your concern while I was absent and indisposed,” he said as he steered Dora toward the door. Then in a lower voice he added, “None of this mewling sentimentality for you
, Mother! He’s a thief and a huckster, no matter how you slice it. Justice has been served, and we shall return home to sort all this out.”
32
“I will tolerate no further displays of your protection!” Dora spouted when the carriage door closed behind them. “I don’t care if you are my son, Lord Darington! No one tells me how to feel or whom to love.”
Jude and his brother gaped at their mother. Maria stayed out of this squabble, and she hoped Jemma, on the opposite carriage seat beside her mother, had the sense to remain quiet, too.
Pandora Darington, who looked every inch the mythological goddess, sat ramrod straight with her wrists crossed atop her parasol handle. “As I told you before, I fulfilled my obligations by providing each of you an estate. Any normal mother would have been happy that her firstborn received the entire package, but I loved my children equally! I sacrificed my dignity—the best years of my life—to compensate for your father’s disinterest!”
Maria glanced out the carriage window, pondering what Jason’s mother did not say. By all appearances, she’d recovered from her loveless marriage—but then, Dora didn’t hold society’s measuring stick up to her own experience and settle for it. And Maria admired that.
“We’re all exhausted, Mother,” Jason muttered. “We have never questioned your love or sense of maternal duty. But I cannot allow you to become yet another doormat for Polinsky! I distrusted him the moment I saw him—”
“Precisely my point! You wouldn’t like any man I fancied!” Dora then glared at Jude, who sat silently beside her. “And you couldn’t care less who I’m in bed with as long as it doesn’t interfere with your amusing pursuits—not that you’re any more honorable than I! Masquerade with Sarah Remington all you want, but you haven’t the decency—the integrity—to stop sneaking around with Maria! Do the three of you intend to share the same bed after the wedding?”
“For God’s sake, Mum—”
“I should inform the vicar of this situation,” Dora continued in a rush. “If only to ensure the Darington heirs’ bloodline remains pure—”
“What the hell does that mean?” Jason spouted. “If Jude and I are both of Galsworthy spawn, we’ve been living under an assumed name all our—oh, this is a fine mess, Mother! Quite the spider you’ve been, weaving such a web of deceit!”
He grabbed Maria’s hand. She felt his pulse racing; sensed the tension in his muscles as he struggled to control his emotions. “We’ll sort this out at the town house,” he announced in a dangerously quiet voice. “I can’t discuss your sexual escapades in my father’s home—even if he did know what was going on.”
As she glanced at the stack of newspapers by her feet, Maria cringed. All she wanted to do after the revelations at Meriweather’s party—not to mention the emotional roller coaster of the voyage to America—was hole up in her room, undisturbed, to read Miss Crimson’s columns. If any of these Daringtons learned the truth about her…
Or would the fact that the Inquirer’s gossipmonger had continued writing while she was in America prove she was not Miss Crimson?
Maria shifted, clutching that straw. Once inside the town house, Mrs. Booth’s excitement waylaid their previous conversation: the old housekeeper wanted every detail of how they’d located Jason, what he’d done while he believed himself a pirate…. Maria slipped away from the parlor on the pretext of freshening up before they resumed their family discussion.
Quentin grabbed her in the vestibule. With a finger on his lips, he steered her to the alcove beneath the service stairway at the back of the house, where he stored his tools. From a wooden crate that had once held tins of peaches, he pulled a fat burlap bag. “Mail for Miss Crimson!” he whispered. “I kept your column alive, milady, but I fear I’ve botched the job! Insulted the wrong society types.”
Maria’s heart raced. “How do you mean, insulted the wrong—”
“Here—these two notes came from the Inquirer’s editor, insisting Miss Crimson either apologize to her readers for—for misrepresenting the Queen and her court, or—”
“You made mincemeat of the Queen? How on God’s earth—” Maria clapped her hand over her mouth and then glanced behind them, through the kitchen and into the dining room. She slipped the letter from its envelope, to skim her editor’s familiar handwriting.
Dear Miss Crimson, I regret to inform you that several of our most influential and generous sponsors insist I curtail your column unless—
A whimper escaped her. She unfolded the other missive, dated yesterday.
Dear Miss Crimson, Because you don’t seem yourself of late, I have placated readers and sponsors alike by temporarily suspending your column. I’m hoping you will apologize in print and beg forgiveness—
“Or I will be taken to court on charges of libelous—Quentin!” She glared at the slender butler, heat prickling her face. “After I suggested you not be my ghostwriter, how could you insult my readers to the point—you assured me you’d read every column Miss Crimson wrote! And yet in just two weeks, you’ve gotten me fired unless—”
A gasp made them look up. There stood Jemma, clutching Willie to her shoulder as she gawked at them. “Oh my stars!” she breathed. “You, Maria, are—Mumsy! Mumsy!” she cried as she trotted down the hallway. “You’ll never believe it! Maria is Miss Crimson! Maria is that foul-mouthed society snitch you want to rip limb from limb!”
The blood drained from Maria’s face. She went cold and began to quiver; knew she had some very tall explaining to do, yet couldn’t move from the spot where Jason’s butler had stored this bag of incriminating letters.
And that’s where Jason found her: still rooted to the floor of the butler’s closet. Her fiancé seemed very tall and strong and formidable and…yes, ready to dismember her. “Is it true, what Jemma said?” he demanded. “I don’t believe half the fanciful stuff she spouts, but I must hear this from you, Maria. I’m tired. And frankly, I’ve heard all the outrageous stories I can handle for one day.”
Maria prayed for the floor to open up and swallow her. Her future with Jason, Lord Darington had just come to a crossroads: a painful, humiliating end, if she didn’t find the right words, right now. His tawny eyes bored into hers, begging her to refute his sister.
But she could only stand there alongside Quentin, swallowing rapidly. Struggling to breathe. “I never wrote a word that discredited you or—or your family!” she stammered. “It was all in your mother’s interpretation—”
“And you have penned this hideous column from its inception? Since before I knew you?” His anguished expression implored her to correct him—to lie, if need be, so he could set his mind to rest and get on with other matters at hand.
But she couldn’t do it. Didn’t have an alibi ready—and damn it, now that this huge cat was out of the bag, Maria couldn’t bear the thought of covering every secretive walk into town after dark…watching her back and forever concealing the writing she had always loved, once she married this man. If people read her columns carefully, they knew her scandalous humor gave all of London something interesting to talk about! But she reported only what she herself had seen and heard. She had never embellished or falsified her stories.
And she would not start now.
“Yes, I am Miss Crimson,” she confessed. “Except that while I was away, finding you—”
“I am to blame for this entire episode,” Quentin confessed dolefully. “Miss Palladino, I am profusely sorry for the mess I’ve made. And Jason—Lord Darington, sir—I shall pack my belongings right now and—”
“Nonsense.” Jason glanced at the bulging burlap bag and then at his manservant. “You are excused to assist Mrs. Booth in the kitchen. She insists on serving the family tea and tarts none of us wants to eat. Meanwhile, I have matters to discuss with Mar—Miss Palladino.”
Her throat closed over a protest. Miss Palladino, was it?
Maria resigned herself to the ugliness that would be hurled by those who waited in the parlor. If this weren’t such
a hideously painful moment, when her future hung by an unraveling thread, she could congratulate herself for giving these Daringtons a diversion from their family feud. But she must face the music…even if it were a funeral dirge for her career as a columnist. Hadn’t she sensed this moment would come? Hadn’t Rubio hinted at this in his predictions before the wedding? Joy juxtaposed with excruciating pain…deception, yet revelation.
But Rubio was off dealing with his own demons. She must face hers, too.
They sat in the parlor, staring as she entered a step ahead of Jason: Jemma, Jude, and Dora. Judge, jury, and executioner. Pandora Darington rose and pointed a finger, resembling the Grim Reaper despite her sunshine yellow dress. “You!” She bit off the word as though it tasted foul. “A traitor in our midst! Hiding your true identity from us all this time! And to think you almost married my son!”
Maria stood stoically, her hands clasped in front of her. Jason left her then, to face her from behind the settee where his family sat. Never in her life had she felt so alone.
“What? Not a word of explanation or apology?” Dora demanded. “Not even a weak excuse to defend all the scandalous accusations and lies you’ve published about us?”
She opened her mouth to speak, but Lady Darington wasn’t finished.
“Oh, this is rich! Left to your own secretive devices, while living under our roof, you deceived us and shamed us in print! But when brought to account, you’ve nothing to say?”
“How did you get to be Miss Crimson?” Jemma blurted. She shrugged incredulously. “I mean, of all the fine ladies who could have been—”
“You make a worthwhile point, Miss Darington.” Maria’s blood finally reached a full boil as she looked at the princess of this family. “Might I remind you that I was not raised in the lap of luxury? Lord knows you and your mother never miss an opportunity to remind me I’m trash!” she cried. “But when I came to this country with my brother, shortly after we’d been orphaned in Italy, I had no one else to turn to! No one making secret deals to ensure I inherited an estate!”
Sexual Hunger Page 29