Lady Notorious

by Theresa Romain

  Cass looked interested. “Do you have a mistress?”

  “Certainly not! They are far too expensive. And so is backing a restaurant, which I didn’t realize when I began. I must get some more fashionable people into the habit of dining here, so that other fashionable people will come to look at them.”

  Men and women of the beau monde were so often separated. Yet they needed each other, in the most basic sense, for survival. Why act as if they were two separate sorts of creatures who could not be trusted together—like lions and lambs?

  Which was the lion and which the lamb, men and women would never agree. But they would also never tire of talking of it.

  “I do have one idea for decreasing this restaurant’s expenses.” Cass poked at the white cloth over the table. “These cloths. They look lovely, but ask your friend if he’d prefer not to be put to the expense of laundering them all the time.”

  “How much could that possibly cost?” George scoffed.

  When Cass muttered something that sounded like no sense with money at all, he had to defend himself. “Even a common chop house has white linens on the table.”

  “So don’t be common. Don’t let this place look like a chop house. Make it lovelier.”

  He shook his head. “What’s lovelier than a white cloth on the table?”

  “I pity every woman you’ve ever courted.” She sighed. “How about something completely different? Top the tables with glass mosaics or punched-tin sheets. Something to make it look like its own sort of place, so people can’t judge it against the other places they know.”

  “The power of uniqueness,” he mused. “It’s worked well for my friend Lady Isabel. She married a Bow Street Runner and dresses in all sorts of odd things, and no one knows what to make of that, so they assume it’s all right.”

  “She has money, so it is all right. And if this place turns a profit, it’ll be all right, too.” Cass paused.

  “What’s got your tongue? Another suggestion?”

  “No, an observation. I only noticed that the power of uniqueness has worked for you, too. You live within your income and make experiments with a camera obscura and dance every dance at a ball instead of acting too bored for words. And somehow people like you.”

  This touched him, so of course he had to hide it. “There’s no ‘somehow’ about it,” he said. “I’m a very likable fellow. People cannot resist me.”

  “And the tender moment passes into oblivion.” Cass began to tug at the fingers of her gloves.

  “It need not.” George held out a hand. “Allow me, my lady, to help you with your gloves.”

  She smiled, extending her hand, and he pulled at the forefinger of her glove. Just a little tug, a little pull at the rough leather, and it came loose and slipped from the shape of her finger. It drew at the rest of the glove, a gliding over skin that left it only half on and her wrist bare.

  She sucked in her breath, and he felt it in the pit of his stomach.

  “All right?” When she hesitated, he added, “I will respect your wishes. If you pull away, I won’t pursue.”

  She slid her hand closer, dun-colored kid on the pristine tablecloth. “Then how can I ever bear to pull away?”

  This woman. His lips curved. “If you don’t want to, I’m not going to try to convince you otherwise. I’ve told you from the beginning, I’ll keep the distance you want me to.”

  “And how much distance do you want to keep?”

  He rubbed a hand over his eyes. “Not enough, God help me.”

  “You act as if you’re courting me.” She sounded mystified.

  His hand dropped to the table with a thump. “Certainly not. If I were, you’d be under far more illusions about me and you’d be much more impressed.”

  “Then I like this better.” Within the half-off glove, her fingers played.

  He tugged it off the rest of the way, then handed it to her and made quick work of its mate. “Besides,” George careened on, “I’ve undressed much more of you than this.”

  “You have.” Cass looked at him curiously. “I can’t tell what you’re thinking about that.”

  I’m thinking that I’ve not undressed enough of you. Not enough, God help me.

  It wasn’t just about wanting to take her clothes off and enjoy the pleasures of the flesh with her—though there was certainly plenty of that, and he’d been a fool to think he could strip off so much as a glove without wishing for more.

  No, it was that he wanted her close. Choosing him, belonging with him. He wasn’t a fellow who had done much with his life, but with her, he thought about what was possible.

  And if that didn’t sound like a man in trouble, then he ought to hire another investigator to examine his head.

  “I’m thinking . . .” he began, casting about for something neutral to say. A movement of the kitchen door saved him. “That the first pies are here. Ah! Thank you, Antoine.”

  What the Frenchman set before each of them was no pie George recognized. It looked like a tiny tart, its edges crimped and golden brown and ready to crumble. Within was not the usual custard or fruit, but some mixture of bubbled, browned cheese and egg from which bits of crisp pork and onion peeked.

  “What do you call this, Antoine? I’ve never seen such a pie. Er—it is a pie, isn’t it? The lady rejects all food but pies.”

  “I do not!” Cass replied. “And this smells like heaven. And it has a crust, so it must be a pie.”

  “Scabs have a crust,” George said. “Would you consider them pies?”

  “That is disgusting. Of course not. You’re desperate to make me forget that we were talking about something serious before, and it’s working. I can hardly hear my own voice over the sound of my growling stomach.”

  Antoine looked pleased. “This is called a quiche. New in France, and very good idea. Make a tart shell, put in any food with egg, and bake it.”

  George poked it with a fork. “Will I turn into a Frenchman if I eat it?”

  “Vous n’êtes pas si chanceux.” With a sniff, Antoine turned toward the kitchen. “Eat. I complete one more pie.”

  “I speak French, you know,” George called after him. “I understood that.”

  Antoine made a particularly Gallic and rude gesture before passing through the door.

  George snorted. “He said I wasn’t lucky enough to be French. Can you believe it?”

  Cass did not appear to be listening. She was already forking up bits of the pie that did not look like a pie, making little happy-mouth moans that made George want to bang his head against the wall. “Don’t make sounds like that,” he said. “Or I shall forget what I said about not pursuing.”

  “I’m just eating pie,” she said. “And I don’t recall drawing back.”

  “Um,” responded George. The look in her eye was pure mischief—then her eyes closed as she took a bite, and the expression on her face was pure pleasure.

  He couldn’t recall when he’d last had any sort of pure feeling.

  So he took her example, applied himself to the strange little tart, and found it very pleasant. There was much to like about salty eggs and cheese, crispy pork, browned and savory onions in a crust.

  Cass finished first, her expression doleful as she regarded a plate that held only crumbs. And then she looked around the space again, her brows knit. “You’ve not had diners enough come? With food like that?”

  George brandished his fork. “See? It doesn’t make sense, does it?”

  “Well . . .” She cleared her throat, a little smile tugging at her lips. “Might I make another suggestion.” It was not posed as a question.

  “Please. Yes. I can’t promise that I’ll take them, or that Antoine will, but if you can’t make suggestions, you’ll puff up with unspoken words and won’t fit in the chair anymore.”

  She eyed him. Then she reached out her fork, took the last bit of quiche from his plate, and popped it in her mouth.

  Once she’d swallowed the bite over his protest, she said
, “That was my tithe. And here’s my first thought: don’t try to make Antony’s a place for the ton. Let it be for the merchants and their wives. Cits and whatever else you like to call them.”

  An interesting notion. “People with money, you mean, but without blue blood.”

  “Right. This is a business, so you need people with money to come here. Not only that, you need the sort of person who pays his shot.”

  “Ah. Yes. The nobility are usually terrible at that.”

  “And,” she added, “there are far more merchants dining out in London than there are dukes or that sort of person.”

  “Because dukes keep their own French cooks?”

  She looked at him with patient tolerance. “Because most people aren’t dukes. One-quarter of your immediate family is made up of dukes, and another quarter is a duchess, but that’s not the case for most people.”

  “Your arithmetic is unassailable. Very well, I see. More customers equals a happy restaurant. Ah! Our next pie? Thank you, Antoine.”

  The plates the chef laid before them this time were much more familiar: a semicircle of thick pastry with sweet, fragrant juices bubbling from the slits in the crust.

  “A pasty?” Cass asked. “What sort of fruit is inside it?”

  “It is not a pasty, but a pie for the hand.” Antoine ticked on his fingers. “Elles contiennent les pommes, les baies sucrées, les—”

  George rolled his eyes. “Oh, stop. You’re impressing the lady with all that French, and she’s meant to be my breakfast companion.”

  He poked at the pie, then hissed as it burned his fingertips. “This isn’t baked. You’d never have had the time. How ever did you cook it?”

  Antoine beamed. “It is fried! Melted lard, thin dough, fruit stewed in sugar.” He kissed his fingertips. “All in a few minutes, you have a breakfast pastry.”

  “You are a great talent,” Cass said. “I am very impressed. You don’t even have to speak French.”

  George must have looked rather stormy at this comment, for Antoine winked at Cass and said, “For the sake of my hide, I return to my kitchen. You come back when you wish, yes, Miss Benton si charmant? Any day. You knock at my kitchen door.”

  The Frenchman withdrew with a waggle of fingers that made George want to slam that kitchen door and bolt it. Ungracious since he was dining on the man’s generosity, but there it was.

  “Don’t look like such a thundercloud,” said Cass. “I can be impressed with his skill without wanting to . . . to pretend to be his cousin and stay in his house and take on his case.”

  George lifted his brows. “Your completely fictional scenario intrigues me. Are you saying you’re impressed with me?”

  “I’m saying the world cannot handle two of you, Lord Northbrook.” She poked at her pie. “Still too hot.”

  “I don’t think that’s what you were thinking about me. Not really. But if you’re too bashful, I will let it slide for the moment.” He relented. “You made it look easy at Billingsgate. Knowing what to do and whom to talk to.”

  Such confidence she had. Not the puffed-up confidence of lordlings at White’s, who had been convinced that their maleness and money would see them through any situation. Cassandra Benton’s confidence came from experience and common sense. From having faced situations those lords would never dream of, and having made her way through by wits and will. She always knew what to do, and George could think of nothing more beautiful than such a knowledge.

  She waved off the compliment. “You do the same in a ballroom. And I wouldn’t have done much of anything if you hadn’t collared that boy who picked my pocket. Really, it’s all practice and effort. That’s what completes cases. Every case needs to be completed and set aside, because there will always be another.”

  “What if you can’t complete a case?”

  She looked troubled. “Then I can’t set it aside.”

  As their pies cooled from broiling to warm, she told him about the cases she was pursuing. Charles’s cases, Charles’s work. She’d made it her own, taking it upon her heart. The country girls taken to brothels by the Watch; the pockets picked and throats cut and wives sold. Never had George imagined London was such a dangerous place, and he said so.

  “We didn’t see that London today. This was only a bit of adventure for you.” She shook her head. “There are parts of this city where people would kill for a fish, or a loaf of bread.”

  “Do you go to those places often?” He tensed, awaiting her reply.

  “Rarely. Only when I must. I hate going to those streets, because nothing I do there makes a difference. A penny given to a child to buy a bun? It’ll be stolen by someone bigger. Helping Charles arrest a man who drinks too much and breaks shop windows with his fists? He might use those same fists on his wife and children, but at least he offers them safety from others.”

  She picked up the hand-pie before her, looking at its shape as if it were unfamiliar. “When people are desperate to survive and half-starved, they don’t care about Bow Street. Who cares for the law if it stands between an empty belly and the first meal in a day?”

  “They have nothing to lose,” George realized aloud.

  “Nothing,” she agreed. “And there’s always a child being hit, or a girl from the country taken to a brothel, or a dishonest member of the Watch.”

  “But to help even one of them—that’s not nothing. To help one person, even once.” He regarded her, silent and still, and said quietly, “It’s not nothing, Cass. In fact, I think it’s everything.”

  She looked up at him then, and a flicker of sunlight caught the irises of her eyes. They were warm and wide and, he thought, hopeful.

  She had that strong chin, that sharp cleft. Her skin was lightly freckled with gold. He was accustomed to thinking of her as all angles and points. Not in an unattractive way; it was merely that she gave the impression of being utterly shielded. But sometimes, when he looked at her unawares and she didn’t catch him at it, her straight brows with the soft downward curve at the ends gave her a worried look, and he would have given anything he possessed to know what was on her mind, and what it would take to slip behind that shield of hers.

  Finally, she was setting it down, and what was behind it was so unguarded that he felt her vulnerability, again, as that precious glass ball entrusted to his keeping.

  “I’m a good investigator,” she said at last. “But I do the work to help Charles pay the bills, not because I love it. I don’t love it. Every time I can’t close a case, it’s like a bruise on my heart.”

  “Because you care about them all. Just as you cared about Lord Deverell.” He had to ask. “If you don’t like investigating, why do you choose that way of helping Charles?”

  “It matters to him. And that means I matter. And you can’t imagine how few ways there are for a woman to matter in London in this Year of our Lord 1819.”

  She said this so frankly that he had to think it over for a minute. “I can imagine,” he finally said. “Or try to. I often feel powerless myself.”

  “You?” she scoffed. “A courtesy marquess and an heir since birth?” She finally took a bite of the pie, and he lost her for a few moments to gustatory bliss. This rather spoiled the effect of his reply, not that that stopped him from making it.

  “Cass, none of that means a tick if I can’t help the people I care about. I cannot convince my father to stop laying waste to Ardmore’s future, and I cannot draw my mother out of the laudanum bottle.” He sighed. “I would dearly love sometimes, Cass, to matter.”

  “Those are their cages, not yours.” But the proud lines of her face softened. “You care, too. Any heart can be bruised, can it not? You’ve had fewer choices than I realized.”

  Her kind words were too much. He backed into flippancy. “Ah, well. It’s a great big cage, and well furnished. I shouldn’t wish for escape. There’s no denying it’s an easy life, even if it’s none of my making.”

  They ate for a few minutes, and it was a simple pleasur
e. A genuine one, to eat good food from clean dishes in fine company. The pie’s filling was hot, but not too much so, and sweet and tart and flavorful, and it was no act to become enraptured by pastry for a few gluttonous moments.

  And then a thread of memory snagged on his consciousness, making him set down his food and pose a question. “Are you willing to leave London for the case? There is a chance we could make a vacation of it to Chichester.”

  “A vacation?” Her eyebrows were all skepticism. “Surely you misspoke. I am on a case for you.”

  “Yes, yes, of course I misspoke. I mean to call it a business journey, during which we would work very hard and you would not enjoy yourself at all.”

  “You mean the opposite, and now I don’t know what to say.”

  “Let me say it for you a different way: several members of the tontine are planning to go to Chichester in three days’ time. I’ve been invited as well, and I hadn’t decided whether to accept, but perhaps I ought. There will be a match race at Goodwood, and a house party at the Duke of Richmond’s estate, and—you’re looking a little green.”

  “Too much pie,” Cass gasped. “Or too many dukes. I’m fine. I just—Isn’t there something I could watch for in Covent Garden?”

  “I’m certain there is. But not related to the tontine.” He paused for maximum effect, then said casually, “It’s your duty, and you’ll make a difference, and you’ve been paid to solve that case. But if you want to stay and do Charles’s work, I understand.”

  Unconcerned, he picked up his pie and took a large bite. When he set the last crust down again, she was watching him with narrowed eyes. “You’re baiting me.”

  “Of course I am,” he said cheerfully. “Is it working?”

  “You really think I would make a difference? Going to Chichester?”

  “I would consider it a great personal favor. You are my bodyguard, remember. Angelus and Callum Jenks both said you ought to keep me safe.”

  She laughed. “You don’t need me for that.”

  “I might not. But are you willing to take the chance?”

  Half-consumed, her pie was dripping syrupy purple juice onto its plate. Cass poked a fingertip into it. “I’d love to see more of England than London,” she said slowly. “I never have. But how can I do what I wish when I resent Charles every time he does the same?”