by Hope Tarr
“Pray don’t scold her, milady,” Hattie said, patting Bea on the back. “Our girl has a good heart and always has despite the old tantrums. I only hope Mr. Billingsby is mindful of what a little treasure he has.”
Bea felt a guilty twinge, but shoved it aside. She and Mr. Billingsby were promised, but marriage lines had yet to be spoken. And the plan she was about to put into play was as much for his sake as hers.
Lifting her hand from Bea’s shoulder, Hattie slanted Kate a wry look. “Speaking of eyes wide-open, do you wish to have The Talk with our lamb, milady, or shall I?”
The Talk? Oh, dear Lord! Swinging her gaze back to the mirror, Bea confirmed she wore her blush-burned cheeks like twin brands.
“That isn’t necessary,” she spoke up, mortified for all the wrong reasons. “I have spent considerable time in the country, if you recall.”
Kate rolled her eyes, clearly thinking her a ninny. “Men and women are not barnyard beasts. Lovemaking in marriage is meant to bring about procreation, of course, but it is meant to bring pleasure, too.” She hesitated, biting her bottom lip as if weighing her words. “Should you wish for time for you and Mr. Billingsby to become accustomed to one another, there are ways of postponing conception. Despite what anyone else may tell you, you are under no obligation to have a family straightaway.”
Bea hadn’t given a great deal of thought to motherhood beyond its inevitability. She would become a mother sooner or later and that was that.
“I brought you something.” Kate glanced back at the bedroom door as if to confirm it remained closed. Turning back to Bea, she dropped her voice to barely above a whisper. “Consider it an early wedding gift.” She reached into her robe pocket and brought out a tiny tin.
Taking it from her, Bea wondered why Kate had chosen this late hour for gift-giving when she was staying a full week. Anticipating jewelry—earbobs given the box size—she flipped up the latched lid.
A dozen or so tiny, folded, papery…things lay within. Gingerly, she plucked one out and set the box down. She held it up to the light. The balloon was narrow and elongated like a baby’s booty only longer and sheerer than any stocking she’d before seen.
“Roll it over your two fingers, only take care not to puncture it with your fingernails,” Kate cautioned.
Bea obliged, rolling the object over her middle and forefinger. It wasn’t a balloon or a stocking at all but a sheath made of some thin and slightly moist membranous tissue. The inside seemed to have been treated with some form of unguent for it slid slickly over her fingers.
Understanding struck. She jerked her head up and looked between her two companions, Hattie choking back giggles, Kate silent and steely-eyed.
“Is this what I think it is?” she asked, a telltale treble to her tone. If so, then Kate’s “wedding gift” could not have been better timed.
Kate cleared her throat. “It’s called a prophylactic or more commonly, a French Letter. Should you wish to prevent conception or disease—and I should hope Mr. Billingsby will be a sufficiently devoted husband to render the latter concern nil—sheath your husband’s member with one of these or have him do so before he enters you. It may seem strange, even awkward at first but one quickly adapts to the practice or so I’m told.”
“You don’t know?” Surprise sent the question slipping out before Bea had the chance to consider it.
The bright scarlet stain spreading over her sister’s face confirmed the answer as no. “After this baby arrives, Rourke and I have decided to be more…mindful of planning our family.”
Never before had Bea known Kate to be the novice. Growing up nine years apart, her big sister had seemed almost a supreme being to her. Currently Kate was a sublime wife, mother and household manager, as well as a published authoress of her first mystery novel. That Bea would get to try the prophylactic first, far sooner than Kate could know, wasn’t strictly speaking an “accomplishment”; still, it sent a prideful thrill shooting through her.
“Let us change the subject, shall we?” Red-faced, Kate picked up the brush. “Have you given any thought to how you shall wear your hair?”
“My hair?” Bea echoed, still playing with the prophylactic.
Scissoring her covered fingers to test the sheath’s strength, she tried imagining rolling it over Mr. Billingsby’s less than stalwart member. Instead images of Ralph’s face and yes, his member, or rather how she imagined it, crowded into her mind. How was it that the thought of touching her future bridegroom so intimately made her feel squeamish while the thought of touching Ralph made her feel quivery and hot?
“On your wedding day,” Hattie supplied.
Bea shrugged. “I suppose I shall wear it as I always do.” Her worries were all for the wedding night. Beyond being fitted for her gown and ordering her trousseau, she hadn’t given the day much thought.
“But you have such pretty hair,” Kate said, sifting her fingers through Bea’s loosened locks, which were abundant, but poker straight and so far impervious to any curling iron known to man. “And a woman is a bride but once. Though we were barely speaking, still Rourke says he’ll remember how I looked standing beside him at the altar ’til his dying day.”
Sighting her sister’s dreamy-eyed reflection, Bea felt a stab of envy. Rourke and Kate had both been too stubborn to admit it, but their marriage of convenience was a love match from the first. The best Bea could look forward to with Mr. Billingsby was companionship and, if she might manage it, satisfying sex. Still, security was not to be sneezed at.
She pulled the prophylactic off and dropped it back in the box. “The veil will cover it.”
“You’ll be a beautiful bride whatever you choose.” Stepping back, Kate began dividing Bea’s hair into sections for braiding as she’d used to do.
“Leave it loose,” Bea said. The tension within her had been steadily building ever since the announcement in the library. She felt as if the corners of her eyes were being pulled back to her ears.
Kate stepped back. “Very well, only don’t blame me when the maid can’t get a comb through it in the morning.”
Bea cast a guilty glance to the tin of French Letters sitting in open view. If her evening went as planned, she wouldn’t be laying her head all that terribly long. “I’ve been wearing it to bed undone for months now.”
Undone. How utterly perfectly that single word summed up her life.
2
Lesson Two
“Women being of a tender nature want tender beginnings.”
—The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana
RALPH SAT UP IN THE leather-upholstered wing chair in his bedroom suite, the single malt blazing a trail down the back of his throat, the light rhythmic rain pattering outside his window sounding like rifle fire inside his head. Three drinks in and he’d still to recover from the ridiculous notion that the whole world, his whole world, lay in rubble.
Beatrice Lindsey was to marry. By the month’s end, she would plight her troth with another man, a man by the name of Billingsby. Even as he strove to absorb the shock, he fought against feeling it. Kate’s baby sister was no baby at all, but a young woman approaching her majority. If he recalled her birthday as precisely as he did every other detail about her, she would turn one-and-twenty upon the first of February, an age by which well-bred young women were expected to marry.
Ralph’s twenty-first year seemed another lifetime. By then he’d already seen several years’ service as a pickpocket for Johnnie Black, a pony racer for Astley’s Amphitheatre and lastly a magician and mimic for myriad London variety saloons. His wasn’t yet a long life, but it had been a full one.
Sheltered though Beatrice was, last winter’s flight from London was but one of several proofs that she more than knew her own mind. If Mr. Billingsby was her choice, and it seemed he was, then the only course a rational man might take was to wish her happy and hope the sot possessed sufficient sense to appreciate his great good fortune.
When it came to Beatrice Lindsey, Ralph was not a rational man.
What he was, at the moment, was an angry man, and the target of his fury, irrational though it might be, was again Beatrice. She’d had him on first in the dining room and then in the hallway with her halting whispers and her contrived touches and her fraught, frequent glances. Those searching, soulful looks had melted him, made him think that, future or not, he must mean something to her.
But now he knew better. And yet something about that blessedly brief, bleak celebration in the library hadn’t smelled quite right.
Mr. Billingsby is a verra fortunate fellow, Rourke had later exclaimed, setting aside his champagne in favor of Scotch.
If Ralph lived a century, he’d never forget how Beatrice’s gaze had gone dead. It is I who am the fortunate one, she’d dutifully answered, but like a wind-up doll, she’d seemed only to be going through the motions.
Billingsby. The very name struck a note so sour that not even Rourke’s finest whiskey could take away the taint. Faceless and formless and innocent of any wrongdoing though Beatrice’s bridegroom was, still Ralph despised the bastard almost beyond the brink of bearing.
He drained his glass of the Scotch and briefly considered pouring more. But getting pissed wouldn’t do anyone any good, least of all him. Instead he set the tumbler aside and took up the book lying in his lap. Vatsyayana’s Kama Sutra was the sole companion with which he could tolerate sharing his otherwise solitary evenings. The world of the Hindu sage was an exclusively male domain that modernism had mostly vanquished. Yet pretending it still existed suddenly seemed a most comforting thought.
The knock outside his door was so soft that at first he mistook it for the rain. A second rapping, slightly louder, had him closing the book and eyeing the wall clock. It was almost midnight. If his nocturnal caller was another dim-witted housemaid, by God he’d have Hattie’s head. Still, for prudence sake, he laid the book facedown on the table before rising. Cinching his robe, he made his way over to the door.
He opened it partway, expecting giggles and gin-laced breath and cheeks roasted red from hours of working too near the fire. Instead a caped Beatrice awaited him on the other side. If wishful thought had been a tangible force, he might almost believe he’d conjured her from air.
“May I come in?” she asked softly, not exactly a whisper but near enough.
Ralph nodded. He opened the door the rest of the way and stepped back to admit her.
“I hope I’m not disturbing you.” Biting at her bottom lip, she whisked past him, her cloak hem brushing the tops of his slipper-shod feet.
“No.” Belatedly he realized he still held the door. “I was…reading,” he added. He closed the door and ushered her inside.
His sitting room wasn’t much—a settee covered in moth-eaten red velvet, a small wine table upon which he’d set his glass and book and a pair of armchairs upholstered in a fairly hideous Scottish plaid, all castoffs he’d foraged from the attic. The space suited his needs, but looking with fresh eyes, her eyes, he supposed it must seem impossibly shabby.
He gestured her to the other chair, but she shook her head. “I think better on my feet. But please sit if you wish.”
Ralph might be the son of a whore and a former pickpocket, but he prided himself on a gentleman’s manners. Remaining standing, he folded his hands behind his back, bracing his right hand about the wrist on his left, mentally manacling himself from doing what he desperately wished to do, which was to sweep her into his arms and kiss her until the Mr. Billingsbys of the world were obliterated from her brain.
Instead, he stood still, stock-still, and studied her, curious as to what, if anything, she wore beneath the cape. “I trust you weren’t seen?”
The likelihood of someone seeing her in this part of the castle at this hour of the night was remote, yet not unthinkable. With so many persons housed beneath one roof, one never knew who might be milling about.
“I shouldn’t think so.” She reached up with one slender hand, drew back the fur-lined hood, and shook out her lovely long hair.
It was obvious she had something to say to him, equally obvious that she was stalling. She wrung her hands. Small and white and slender, beyond her face they were the sole part of her body he could see. “I am keeping you from your rest.” She started toward the door.
Cock hard, he stepped in front of her, blocking her path. “You are keeping me from nothing.” Now that she was here, setting aside his anger and betrayal required no more effort than closing the cover on the contraband book. “Fancy some tea? I have a spirit lamp,” he added, rather foolishly. He had a spirit lamp, but then so did everyone else.
She hesitated and then shook her head. “No, please don’t bother.”
“It’s no bother, but if you’re quite certain—”
“Quite,” she broke in, cutting him off.
Silence fell between them like the heavy velvet theater curtains he recalled from his performing past. For several minutes, the clock’s ticking and the rain’s pattering and Ralph’s blood roaring through his ears were the only sounds to break the heavy silence.
“I know you must think me brash in coming here like this,” she finally managed to get out. “But I assure you I have thought the matter through most carefully, and I see no other course.”
She looked so adorably uncertain, so soberly serious that despite everything, he found himself fending off a smile. “And what matter might that be, Lady Beatrice?”
“I wish for you to tutor me.”
The pronouncement gave him pause. Book read and street smart though he was, he’d had scant schooling. What fractional formal education he possessed he’d picked up from Salvation Army classrooms where the free soup, not the lessons, had been his draw.
“Tutor you in what subject?”
She drew a deep breath and slowly exhaled it. “I wish for you to tutor me in…sex.”
BEATRICE REACHED UP, her hand working down the queue of hooks fronting her cape with remarkable speed. Coming to the end, she shrugged her shoulders. The cape slid off. Rich, red velvet pooled about her slender ankles, leaving her naked as a newborn, a newborn goddess.
Like a dragonfly caught in amber, Ralph couldn’t move. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t do more than stare. She was beyond beautiful, spellbinding, her blue eyes dark in the dimmed light, her smooth skin opaque. Her hair was a curtain of pale silk, the straight locks bringing to mind not golden sunshine but silvered moonbeam as befitted a creature of the night. The vision put him in mind of an angel he’d seen in a church’s stained-glass window on one of the handful of Sundays he’d gone to worship with his mother. The sight of all that entombed beauty had made him sad. He remembered praying for a way to rescue the beautiful angel and set her free.
Staring at Beatrice, longing filled him, not only physical desire but a soul-deep craving that bordered on aching. He wanted to set Beatrice Lindsey free—from her father, her sister and most of all herself. He wanted to be the one to show her just how good life outside the sanctified temple of society’s rules and expectations could be. He wanted to tear down the barriers of her current constraints and build her a palace large enough to accommodate the wings she would need to soar.
He wanted, he realized, to tutor her not only in sex but in life itself.
She firmed her chin and pulled back her shoulders. Her gaze, both defiant and uncertain, locked on his. “Come now, I’m not so very bad…am I?”
She punctuated the question with a shrug which did intriguing things to her breasts. Small, rounded and tipped in palest pink, they were just as he’d imagined. Her nipples stood out, hard, slightly darker pink points that put him in mind of roses while the buds were still quite closed. It was too early to tell whether she was aroused or simply chilly from the draft. A bit of both, he presumed.
He shook his head. “No, but I am.”
Ralph closed the space between them in a single stride. Beatrice let out a sob and opened her arms. Though he hadn’t laid so much as a finger upon her, he would wager his small
pension she was ready to receive him.
“Beatrice, oh, Beatrice.”
It required a Herculean effort and one that drained every whit of his will, but he did the difficult, near to impossible right thing.
Planting a hand on either slender upper arm, he held her away from him. “Good God, girl, what the devil are you about?”
Her face crumpled. Blast but she was going to cry.
He wagged a finger in her face. “No crying, do you mind me? Not a single tear or I’ll set you out in the hallway as you are.”
The roughness in his voice seemed to work. She firmed her mouth, sniffed and then nodded. “Right, no crying.”
Backing away, he bent and scooped up the cape from the floor, his gaze aligning with her mound, the musk making his mouth water and his cock further thicken.
Straightening, he shook out the garment and, reaching behind her, settled it on her slender shoulders. “For the love of Christ, cover yourself.”
She obliged. Looking both embarrassed and relieved, she turned her attention to refastening the hooks. Ralph shook his buzzing head. Rourke might love him like a brother, but he’d also skin him like cattle were he to find them out. Shagging little sisters counted as a cardinal breach of the manly code.
Duly covered, she looked up at him, one corner of her beautiful mouth edging upward. “In case you’re wondering, I’m ruined already.”
He stared into her unrepentant eyes, wondering if, as in the gallery earlier, she might be playing some game or worse. “You’re soused, aren’t you?”
He recalled her drinking sparingly of the supper wine and scarcely touching her celebratory champagne, but perhaps she’d imbibed more liberally than he’d thought. It was hard to say. Her breath didn’t smell of alcohol. Far from it; her scent put him in mind of the freshness following a springtime shower.
She shrugged. “Hattie and I drank more champagne in my room, but in truth she had the lion’s share.”
“Mad, then?”