by Mary Balogh
Just this time yesterday he had had no more intention of employing a mistress than he had of flying off to the moon. Now he had employed one. Philbin, unusually subdued, had been dispatched to Portman Street with a fat package of money after helping Stephen on with his riding boots.
He had paid handsomely for last night’s sexual encounter and for the exclusive rights to more of the same, at least for the next week.
He did not care about the money. He cared about the deception—he had thought she wanted him, that she had been attracted to him. He had thought it was mutual sexual pleasure they had sought. It was both embarrassing and humiliating to know the truth. And he cared about the trap and the leg shackle he wore just as surely as if she had lured him into marriage.
Why the devil should he also feel responsible for making her respectable? She was not respectable. She had killed her husband. She had sold her body to a stranger and trapped him into being her protector. She—
She had lived through a nomadic, insecure childhood and a nightmare of a marriage. Now she was doing what she needed to do to survive—to put food in her stomach and a roof over her head. There was no way on this earth she would be able to find any other employment but prostitution.
She was prostituting herself to him.
And he was allowing it.
He was forced to allow it on the assumption that she would not take his money unless it came for services rendered.
Hatred did not come naturally to Stephen. Even dislike did not. He liked people of all types. He enjoyed humanity.
But this morning he was consumed by hatred as well as by anger. The trouble was that he did not know whom he hated more or with whom he was more angry—Lady Paget or himself.
It did not matter. The simple fact was that he was going to make her respectable. And he was going to sleep with her enough times that she could preserve her pride and feel she was earning her salary.
His eyes focused upon a heading in the paper, and he read it and the accompanying article with great attention and without taking in a single word. It might have announced the end of the world and he would not have known it.
For of course he did care if she had killed her husband. It was at the crux of everything. Had she or had she not? She had said she had. Why say so if it was not true? He suspected, though, that much of what she had told him was not strictly true. And something about the way she had simply said yes to his question had not rung true.
Or was that wishful thinking on his part?
It was not a comfortable thing to know that the mistress he had just employed was a self-confessed murderer.
It was all very well to take into consideration the fact that she had probably been much abused. But actually to take up a pistol, which had probably not been simply lying around ready to be picked up and fired, and to point it at her husband’s heart and pull the trigger, was …
Well, the very thought of it turned Stephen hot and cold.
It must have been unimaginable abuse if she had been driven to such desperate measures.
Unless she was evil.
Or unless she had not done it after all.
But why lie about such a thing?
And what sort of man was he to have been drawn into her net, even if he had imposed his own terms, when she had actually killed? Or said she had.
His brain felt very much as if it were whirling inside his skull just like a child’s spinning top. At last he folded the paper neatly, set it aside, and rose to leave the club without speaking to anyone.
Alice, in a rare mood of open rebellion, refused to accompany Cassandra to Lady Carling’s at-home. It was not that she did not approve of Cassie’s attending such an event, especially when she had been invited by Lady Carling herself. Indeed, she thought it the very best thing that could possibly have come out of that risky business of last evening’s ball. But she did not wish to meet Cassie’s lover in any such public setting, where she would feel obliged to be civil to him.
“But it is to avoid going driving in the park with him that I want you with me, Alice,” Cassandra explained, watching her friend mending the seam of a pillowcase, a task that she ought to have been sharing. “He mentioned a curricle. I would be very high off the ground and very much on public display. But there is room for only two on the seat of a curricle. I could refuse to abandon you if you were with me.”
But Alice would not go. She pressed her lips together and chose to be mulish. Her needle stabbed vengefully into the seam and back out again.
“You would be laughed to scorn, Cassie,” she said after a while. “A widow of your age does not cling to a mere companion when a gentleman comes to take her on an outing.”
“You are not my companion,” Cassandra said. “Not any longer. I have not been able to pay you for almost a year, and when I finally offered you some money this morning, you refused to take it.”
Alice wrapped the cotton thread about one finger and snapped it off rather than use the scissors, which were on a table at her elbow.
“I will not take one farthing of his money,” she said, “or any other money you earn in such a way. It was not this I had in mind for you, Cassie, when you were a girl in my charge. Never this.”
For a moment her chin wobbled, but she brought it under control and pressed her lips together again.
“I think,” Cassandra said, “he is perhaps a kind man, Alice. I think he is overpaying me, and I am sure he must know it. And he said that he would never—Well, he said that what is between us must always be mutual. That he would never—Well, force me.”
Alice turned the pillowcase the right way out, shook it furiously to rid it of some of the wrinkles, and rolled it ready to be ironed.
“Every piece of linen in this house is as close to being threadbare as makes no difference,” she grumbled irritably.
“After a week or two,” Cassandra said, “we will be able to afford to buy new things to replace them.”
Alice glared.
“I am not ever going to set my head on any pillowcase bought with his money” she said.
Cassandra sighed and lifted the hand that Roger was nudging with his cold nose. She set it down on his furry head, and he placed his chin on her lap, looked up at her with doleful eyes, and let out a sigh to match her own.
“His family seems genuinely genteel,” she said. “They went out of their way to behave with kindness toward me last evening. They were at the same time, of course, saving themselves from embarrassment and perhaps even social disaster, but even so they all seemed like good people.”
“They will have an apoplexy apiece if they think he is courting you,” Alice said, “or has taken you as his mistress.”
“Yes,” Cassandra agreed, pulling her fingers gently along Roger’s silky ear. “He is extremely handsome, Alice. He looks like an angel.”
“Some angel,” Alice said, setting her needle none too gently in the pincushion on the table. “Coming home with you last night and then paying you this morning and offering more in future for more of the same. Some angel.”
Cassandra ran the fingers of her other hand along the stubby remains of Roger’s other ear and held both ears up so that he looked sleepy and lopsided. She smiled at him and let go of his ears.
“Come with me this afternoon,” she said to Alice.
But Alice had her mind made up and was quite adamant.
“I am not going with you, Cassie,” she said, getting firmly to her feet. “I have not been paid in almost a year, as you just pointed out, and that is as it should be. It also means I am free. It means I am not your servant. And I can earn my own living and support the both of us as well as Mary and Belinda—and that dog—without your having to … Well. I know you think I am too old for anyone to employ, but I am only forty-two. I am not quite in my dotage. I am able-bodied enough to scrub floors if I have to or sew for twelve hours at a time in some seamstress’s back room or do any number of other things. I am going to be busy on my own account this aft
ernoon. I am going to call at some employment agencies. Someone must want me.”
“I do, Allie,” Cassandra said.
But Alice was not to be mollified. She went from the room, her back ramrod straight, her chin in the air, and left the door open behind her.
Soon a little face appeared about one side of it, and it broke into a delighted smile as the body followed the face into the doorway and then into the room.
“Doggie,” Belinda said, hurrying forward to catch him before he could flee.
But Roger, though an old, rather lethargic dog, was occasionally in the mood to play and was always willing to be petted. He met the child halfway across the room, his tail waving, his rear end wiggling, his tongue panting. She threw her arms about his neck, her gleeful laughter turning to high giggles and delighted screeches as he licked her face.
She had grown out of her dress about six months ago, but she was still wearing it. It was faded from many washings but spotlessly clean. All its worn places were carefully darned. Her cheeks were rosy from a recent washing—which would be repeated if Mary discovered that Roger had been kissing her. Her soft brown curls were held back from her face with a faded, half-frayed ribbon. She was barefoot, since she had outgrown her shoes and wore them only when she left the house.
She was three years old. Mary’s love child.
And very very precious.
“Hello, sweetheart,” Cassandra said.
Belinda turned a sunny smile on her and then giggled again as Roger rolled onto his back and waved his three paws in the air. She lay down on the floor beside him and patted his stomach and then wrapped one skinny little arm right about him.
“The doggie likes me,” she said.
“That is because you like him,” Cassandra said, smiling.
She would be able to pay Mary at last. She would even be able gradually to pay everything she owed her. Mary would be unwilling to take the back pay, but Cassandra would insist and Mary would not resist for long. She needed to buy new clothes for her daughter.
Cassandra would buy the child some little trinkets too. And Mary. Not Alice, though. Alice would not accept any gift in her present mood.
She had a protector, Cassandra thought, verbalizing the word very clearly in her mind. She was a mistress—paid for the sexual favors she would provide. There would, of course, be nothing mutual in the things that would happen between her and the Earl of Merton, despite his insistence that there would. For she would never want him despite his beauty and his undeniably appealing masculinity and virility. And despite what she suspected was a genuine kindness in his nature.
Nine years of marriage had killed any interest she could possibly have in what the Earl of Merton wanted her to enjoy with him. If he waited until she wanted what he wanted, he would wait forever and she would be taking money she had in no way earned.
She would earn her money. Every penny of it. She had some pride. He would never know that there was nothing mutual at all in their sexual relations.
She would give very good value for money.
It all seemed worthwhile as she watched the child play with the dog, both of them equally and blissfully happy—and trusting.
Two precious innocents.
Anything was worthwhile if it could push back by even one day the loss of such innocence.
8
LADY Carling’s at-home was for ladies only. Stephen wondered as he lifted the door knocker and let it fall back against the door if a large number of them would still be in the drawing room or if by half past four most of them would have taken their leave. Perhaps Lady Paget would already have left in an attempt to avoid driving in the park with him.
Perhaps she had not even come, though that would be foolish of her if she hoped to be received ever again by at least some of her peers. She must surely have come to London with a longer-term plan than merely finding a protector to help pay her bills for a few months, until the end of the Season.
Carling’s butler took Stephen’s card up to the drawing room, and Stephen caught the buzz of feminine conversation as the door opened upstairs and then closed again. Some of the guests were still here.
“Lady Carling will be pleased to receive you, my lord,” the butler said when he returned, and Stephen followed him back upstairs.
Many men would have been considerably disconcerted at the prospect of walking in on a company comprising exclusively ladies. Stephen was not among them. Most ladies, he found, were very willing to tease and laugh when they had one man at their mercy, and Stephen was always happy to oblige them and to tease and laugh right back at them. He was still somewhat out of humor today it was true, but he had pushed most of his anger and irritability away while walking home from White’s for luncheon. He could not remain angry for any protracted length of time. Or at least, he would not. No one would be granted that power over him.
He had apologized to Philbin, and his valet had made a stiff bow of acceptance and in so doing had spotted a virtually invisible film of dust over Stephen’s boots, acquired when he had had the effrontery to walk home in them when those particular boots were meant to be worn only indoors or inside a carriage, as his lordship very well knew. Did his lordship know nothing of the damage such dust could do to the leather? And would his lordship remove them right now before the damage was irreparable and Philbin found it quite impossible to hold up his head before the other servants for the rest of his days?
Stephen had sat meekly down and allowed his boots to be pulled off, and the relationship had been restored to a happy normality.
Carling’s butler opened the drawing room doors with a flourish and announced Stephen in deep, ringing tones that brought first silence to the room and then a burst of flutterings and twitterings from the ladies gathered there.
Lady Carling was on her feet and coming toward him, one hand outstretched.
“Lord Merton,” she said. “How delightful.”
“Never tell me, ma’am,” he said, taking her hand in his and looking at her in mock horror, “that your at-home is only for ladies. And all the way here I have been composing an abject apology for being so late arriving.”
“Well, in that case, Lord Merton,” she said, “I will hear it anyway. We will all hear it.”
There was a chorus of assent from the ladies gathered there.
“Well, you see,” he said, “I thought it would be mainly Carling’s friends who would be here, and so I drove through the park on my way in the hope of brightening my afternoon by seeing some of my favorite ladies before I came. And when I found the park almost deserted, I drove over to Bond Street to see if any of them were there, lured by the shops. Then I tried Oxford Street, but all to no avail. And now I discover that every single one of the ladies I most wished to see has been here all the time.”
His outrageous flatteries were met with derision and laughter, and he looked about at them all, a grin on his face. All three of his sisters were there. So was Lady Paget, seated beside Nessie. She was smartly dressed in green again, though it was a sage green today instead of emerald. Her clothes must be one of the few assets she had been allowed to keep after her widowhood. She was wearing no jewelry, just as she had not been last evening.
She did not join in the laughter and teasing of the other ladies. But she did smile—that faint, slightly mocking smile she had worn at the ball last evening and in her bedchamber early this morning. It was a smile he had quickly realized was part of a mask she wore to cover any suggestion of vulnerability she might be feeling.
The sun shining through the window was on the side of her face and in her hair. She looked vividly, almost shockingly beautiful.
“Ladies,” Lady Carling said, linking an arm through his, “shall we send him away again? Or shall we keep him?”
“Keep him,” a few ladies said, amid laughter.
“It would be a pity, Ethel,” the dowager Lady Sinden said, raising a lorgnette to her eyes and regarding Stephen through it, “to doom our poor Lord Merton to
wandering the streets and haunting the park for the next hour while he waits for his favorite ladies to leave your drawing room. It would be best to keep him here and thus keep him happy. Is it your curricle you have been driving half over London, Merton? Or a more sensible carriage?”
“My curricle, ma’am,” he said.
“Then you cannot take me riding in the park afterward,” she said, “even though I am sure I must be your very favorite among the present company. I stopped riding in curricles when I turned seventy a number of years ago. I can get up into them, but I cannot get down out of them without two stout footmen having to lift me bodily down.”
“They must be weaklings of footmen even if they are stout, ma’am,” Stephen said, still grinning at her. “I could lift you down with one arm. You can weigh no more than a feather.”
“Impudent puppy,” she said with a bark of laughter that set her three chins to swaying.
“But alas, ma’am,” he said, “I cannot prove it to you today. I have come because I have already persuaded another lady to drive in the park with me, and she is here.”
“And who is the fortunate lady?” Lady Carling asked as she drew him down to sit beside her on a sofa. “Did I promise such a thing last evening and have simply forgotten? But how could any lady possibly forget such a thing?”
She leaned forward to the tea tray in order to pour his tea.
“Alas, ma’am,” he said, “Sir Graham was at your side and I dared not even ask. He might have throttled me. Lady Paget has agreed to drive with me.”
There was a small silence in the room.
“Stephen has a sporting curricle,” his sister Kate said, “a quite terrifying-looking beast. But he is a notable whip, Lady Paget. You will be quite safe with him.”
“It had not occurred to me,” Lady Paget said in her low, velvet voice, “that I might not be.”
Her eyes met Stephen’s as he raised his cup to his lips, and for a moment he felt a return of this morning’s anger. She was beautiful and she was desirable and she had him tangled in her web, like a spider with a fly. An ugly image. But an apt one.