Jake’s heart pounded in his chest as a side note to a memory long buried came to him. Fifteen years ago. Nagasaki. The powerful Kimura family’s compound. He’d shared space with this man who was Jiro, sitting unobtrusively in the corner of a state room, recording with his watercolors the events of the trading day.
This man had been a trusted member of the Kimura household, and he’d stolen the paintings and betrayed them, risking his life. For what reason? Not money. The man still possessed the stolen paintings. Then why? And why here in London?
Olivia stepped inside, and the door snapped closed behind her. Jake bit back a curse. He’d been too lax of late. Too focused on Olivia. What she and he shared was secondary to this. This—to find the thief and uncover his secrets—had been his reason for bargaining with her, not to understand her better. Not to know her every thought, her every feeling.
He’d been skirting the edge of disaster in his dealings with Olivia . . . Lady Olivia. Not only for his intentions regarding the art thief, but for his intentions regarding marriage, his intentions regarding his heart. Given his past failure at love, it was best if his head ruled his heart, rather than the other way around.
Today, Lady Olivia had fulfilled both ends of her side of the bargain. He must let her go.
He slipped into the shadow of an abandoned doorway and propped himself against mildewed stone, its damp seeping through his woolen overcoat, his eyes fast upon the empty door stoop, settling in for a wait.
Not ten minutes later, she reemerged, pulling powder blue gloves onto her hands, her business concluded. He pushed off the grimy wall. Now it was time to settle matters with Jiro.
He was crossing the street when the door again swung inward. Out stepped none other than Jiro, pulling on a pair of buff kid gloves. With no more than two seconds between him and discovery, Jake ducked behind the stalled delivery cart rank with rotten vegetables and caught sight of the man rounding a corner at the end of the block. Jake rushed forward and immediately stopped, thinking better of his actions.
A public confrontation would do him no good. He pointed his feet homeward.
Tomorrow, he would settle this matter, one way or another, and leave it in the past, where it belonged.
~ ~ ~
Evening
Jake opened a plain, white envelope, and two slips of paper slid out into his palm. One a note, the other a newspaper clipping, each unanticipated. He took in the note first:
Queen Street. 10 o’clock.
He glanced at his pocket watch. Nine o’clock. He had an hour.
He turned his attention toward today’s London Diary clipping scented faintly of lavender and sandalwood.
A house for his Queen
Perhaps more than a quick fling?
How soon ‘til banns sing?
It was absolutely about him and Olivia. He should mind, but he couldn’t quite muster the outrage. It might ruin his chances with Miss Fox, as her quick mind would remember Olivia’s mention of Queen Street, but he couldn’t deny, to himself at least, that part of him wanted his chances with Miss Fox to be ruined.
To what end? a voice of reason cut in. He would only have to find another Miss Fox.
The thought chilled him clear through to his bones. Better to stay the path he was on.
The French doors cracked open and into the garden slipped Mina. He crumpled the note and the London Diary clipping in his fist.
“Any stars shoot across the sky tonight?” she asked as she lay on a reclining chair and directed her keen gaze toward the crystalline sky.
“Not one,” he replied, dimming the lamp so they could better see the constellations. He relaxed his hand and let the tight ball drop to the ground, its only sound a single papery bounce.
She held a small, brass telescope to her eye. “The sky here is so different from the one hanging above Singapore.”
He detected a note of homesickness in her voice. “You were born under a sky similar to this one in Dejima.”
Telescope tight to her face, she said, “I would like to return there some day.”
Jake flinched in surprise. She’d never expressed this desire to him before. “Would you?”
“It’s the land of my ancestors. It may sound silly, but I would like to see how I feel there.” A dry laugh roughed her voice, even as her gaze held steady through the telescope. “Likely, I won’t fit there either, but I would like to go all the same.”
Her matter-of-fact tone broke something inside him. “Shall we board the next ship East? It’s not too late.”
She lowered the telescope to her lap and pierced him with a long, measured look. “I am like a puzzle piece that will never fall into place.”
“Mina—”
She held up a staying hand. “I have no true fit in either world, Father. East or West.”
“You needn’t worry about your place.” His hands clenched into fists. “I shall see to it.”
“A piece cannot be forced into place. It either fits, or it doesn’t.” She returned her attention to the ordered night sky. “London is as good as anywhere.”
He wasn’t certain which was worse: her utter acceptance of these facts, or her utter lack of despair. A gut punch from Gentleman Jackson himself wouldn’t have leveled him so completely as did her subdued words, so tolerant of a fate that he refused to accept for her.
“Perhaps,” he began, deciding it was past time to broach the subject, “a stepmother from the ton would help.”
“Father”—Mina hesitated—“even a stepmother with all the right connections wouldn’t help in the ways that matter.”
“She would see to it that the best of Society welcomes you.”
“On the surface, yes, but truly I care not about those people. Besides, a stepmother for me would also be a wife to you. Please don’t make a pragmatic choice based on me. From everything I’ve read on the subject, I think it’s best to let the heart have a say in the matter. I shall find my way.”
Mina settled back into her stargazing, and Jake controlled the urge to jump up and gather her in his arms. Instead, he reached inside his breast pocket, pulled out a letter, and silently handed it to her.
“What is this?” she asked, setting her telescope on a side table.
“It’s a letter from The Progressive School for Young Ladies and the Education of Their Minds.”
“Pithy, isn’t it?” She leaned over and turned up the dimmed lamp. Her humor was a welcome relief.
She opened the letter and scanned its contents. He couldn’t help but notice that in certain lighting, at certain angles, she was looking more and more like her mother. A full minute ticked by before he asked, “Will you go?”
“Yes.”
“Miss Bretagne will be thrilled.”
“You are correct, but thrilled might not be a full enough word to describe Lucy’s enthusiasm. I’m not sure there are full enough words in the entire world of languages.”
Her lips curved into a secret smile. A girlish smile that daughters didn’t share with fathers, only with other girls. His heart lifted on a fragile note of hope.
She collected the letter and her telescope and stood. “Good night, Father. You outlasted me tonight.” She bent her willowy form over him and pressed a kiss to his cheek. “An early morning? I should like to begin classes tomorrow.”
Left alone, he continued thinking how like her mother Mina had become.
His first memory was his strongest memory of her. He closed his eyes beneath the indigo London sky, so like the sky above the Bay of Nagasaki, and allowed it to lead him to that place for the first time in years.
~ ~ ~
The market on the trading island of Dejima was pure bedlam on a slow day.
But the Saturday morning market after a trading ship had d
ocked and unloaded its cargo was a mayhem beyond mere insanity: chickens squawking; goats bleating; horses stamping; fish stinking; traders barking orders; sellers crying wares; customers hustling, bustling, jostling, haggling, dismissing, imploring, leaving, returning, buying, all before moving on to the next stall for another round.
These noises, these crowds, these smells conspired to produce an atmosphere of pure pandemonium that could render the uninitiated claustrophobic within seconds. Add to this intoxicating mixture, pungent spices and miscellaneous goods delivered by the sometimes generous, sometimes miserly, always capricious salty sea, and one had the exact scent of young beginnings.
The twenty-one-year-old Jakob Radclyffe striding through narrow market aisles had long settled into these uneven rhythms of Dejima. Nothing about this world surprised him anymore.
That wasn’t to say the life of a roving sea trader had lost an ounce of its charm. On the contrary. There was nothing life didn’t have on offer for him. It was just that he was confident, as only a youth could be, that he’d seen it all.
That was, until the day he slipped through a narrow gap in the crowd, turned his head as if by instinct, and saw her across the glassy expanse of a still, shallow pond.
She’d been a vision, poised gracefully over the railing of a footbridge arched above languid, undulating koi, while the crowd around her pushed past, each person eager to complete this or that errand. She had a way of remaining completely motionless that was unique to her.
It wasn’t this, however, that drew his notice. It was that she stood nearly a head above everyone around her. He was a tall man by anyone’s standards, but even from this fair distance, he could see that the top of her head would reach above his chin. Unusual in these environs. There wouldn’t be another girl like her for a thousand miles around.
He decided on the spot that he must have her. Brash, young men based such momentous decisions on less.
When he focused on the pleasant side of memory, he recalled that she’d seemed genuinely amused by his pursuit, granting him a coy smile now and again. She wasn’t only beautiful and unusual, but reserved and gentle, too.
Put plainly, she hadn’t discouraged his pursuit. And his twenty-one-year-old self hadn’t the wisdom to separate not discourage from encourage.
A year later, she was dead, and he’d known himself to be a man different from the one he’d thought himself to be. A man selfish, unbearably naïve, and capable of cruelty to his beloved in the face of public humiliation.
A long submerged wave of shame washed over him, pricking his skin with tiny beads of sweat. He’d pushed for too much, too fast. If he hadn’t been such a blind young man, she might have had a different future. She might have lived.
Likely not. It wasn’t the way of the civilized world to forgive such a foolish girl.
At the end, he’d done one thing right: he’d taken Mina.
Protect her, Jakob . . . she’ll have only you . . . only you can do it . . . for Minako, my little Mina.
He had a promise to keep: to protect Mina. Now that he’d secured her school, he would secure her reputation. Tomorrow, he would deal with Jiro, which left only one loose end to tie up tonight: Olivia.
And that must be the end of it, of them. He would be able to focus on finding a proper stepmother for Mina, a proper wife for him. Words true in his mind, but ones that were feeling more and more false in his heart. Perhaps if he repeated them to himself, over and over, they would seem less empty.
Perhaps his belief in them would return.
Chapter 19
Olivia tapped the mother-of-pearl face of her newly fashionable wrist watch. Five minutes until ten o’clock. She’d been awaiting his arrival in the quasi darkness of a dimmed lamp since nine-thirty.
She’d been close, so very close to putting him behind her. She’d fulfilled her end of the bargain—Miss Radclyffe would begin school tomorrow—and, as far as her search for a townhouse went, she’d resolved not to involve him further. She only needed the services of his solicitors. Once the house was purchased, they could go their separate ways as if nothing had ever occurred between them.
Then, this morning, she’d opened the London Diary and saw it, the haiku.
They were known by someone. But who?
Some hack with a pen and an inflated sense of his own power and importance. The individual mattered not, in reality, only the scope of his voice. There was but one way to silence that voice: to truly end matters with Jake. Scandal wouldn’t much change her life, but for him it would decrease his chances of finding a perfectly perfect, suitable, spotless wife.
Of course, the London Diary’s speculation would become confirmed fact if she bought this house. And Miss Fox was clever enough to figure it out. Their one saving grace was that Miss Fox didn’t seem the type to read such a frivolous publication, which, of course, was none of Olivia’s concern.
She lifted her face to the ceiling and took a slow spin, winding round alongside the magnificent staircase that coiled all the way up, up, up to the circular skylight now black with night. She located the small, unobtrusive door she’d missed on her first visit.
Earlier today, Jake’s solicitors had passed along an instruction from the house’s owners that she enter the gray door at the top of the staircase. No further detail was provided her. All very mysterious.
The girl from her youth, the girl who loved gothic novels and currently resided within Lucy, reared her head. Olivia loved a good mystery. Secret doors at the top of staircases were the stuff of her girlish fantasies.
A frisson of anticipation raced up her spine, which, of course, had nothing to do with the fact that her wristwatch now read two minutes to the hour. Two minutes until Jake’s arrival. When had she begun thinking of him as Jake?
She was being disingenuous. She liked this diminutive of his given name, Jakob. It was a name at ease with itself, making him feel more accessible to her. Not that she desired more access.
That, too, was disingenuous.
Except, this feeling wasn’t specifically about access. The diminutive explained something about him, about the man who wasn’t supposed to be The Right Honourable Jakob Radclyffe, Fifth Viscount St. Alban. That man had been Mr. Jakob Radclyffe to many, Captain Radclyffe to some, and Jake to few.
In London, he was Lord St. Alban to all, and Jake only to her. A warm feeling at odds with the chill of the empty house stole through her. It was a feeling she liked too much. A feeling she could nest inside and settle too comfortably within.
She drew in a breath of night-cooled air and glanced again at her wrist watch. Ten o’clock on the nose. One more tick of the gold minute hand, and he would be late.
She picked up the dim lamp and crossed the room to the staircase. Her fingertips feathered across silky smooth walnut. No detail of this house had been ignored. It was light and airy, even in the dark of night. It would have to be this house. The one with a memory of him etched into it. She kept getting herself wrapped up ever tighter with him.
Oh, this house would be her undoing. Doubtless, there would be another haiku published within a week of its purchase. One less opaque. One more specific and pointed. One which would possibly name names. Society dined on this sort of gossip for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, at once satisfied and ravenous for more. But there was no help for it. The heart knew what it wanted, and hers wanted this house. She refused to think about what else her heart might want.
She tilted her wrist watch toward the dim light of the lamp. One minute past ten o’clock. Jake was late.
The clear and distinct echo of footsteps sounded down the hallway, drawing nearer and louder at a brisk but unhurried clip, his clip.
She tried to relax by clenching, then unclenching her fists. At last, he came into focus in the doorway, which neatly framed his lean form. It was as obvious to her a
s it was to every other woman in London that he was simply impossibly handsome. Even in the near dark. Maybe, especially in the near dark as the shadows played with the angles of his face.
Yet there was something more in addition to the impossibly handsome: the impossibly sensuous. When had he become impossibly sensuous?
A vexed frown pinched her lips.
“Am I late?” he asked in a tone that didn’t sound as concerned as his words might have suggested.
“Yes,” she replied, sounding distressingly like Lucy on a petulant day.
“My apologies,” he said on a shallow bow, even as his mouth, that talented, efficient mouth of his, maintained its familiar firm line.
“No need for apologies, my lord. In fact, your tardiness is promising evidence that you are settling into the viscountcy quite well.” She liked the way his eyes narrowed at her stern tone, a tone she couldn’t help borrowing from Mrs. Bloomquist. “It is the first rule of the nobility. Everyone can wait.”
“Then my apologies for not having made you wait longer.”
A begrudging smile found its way to her lips. “Now for the second rule of the nobility.” She allowed a beat to pass. A flash of pleasure coursed through her at the very idea that she could hold this glorious man in suspense. It wasn’t every woman who could boast that particular thrill. “Never apologize.”
He stepped forward, halving the distance between them, and took another bow. “Again, my apologies.”
His gaze pinned her in place, and, like that, the power of the moment shifted to him. Oh, how an unmanageable part of her wanted him to use it. This felt dangerously like flirting. Was she flirting?
She was. In the presence of the tease playing about his eyes and mouth, she couldn’t seem to help herself. She tried clearing her throat, hoping to clear her head in the process.
Tempted by the Viscount Page 20