Vice

by Jane Feather

  Lydia put up her veil again to bid her farewell. “I do hope we’ll be like sisters,” she said, kissing Juliana’s cheek. “It will be so pleasant to have another woman in the house.”

  Juliana murmured something and returned the kiss. She glanced again at Quentin. His face was almost ugly, and she knew he was thinking, as was she, of Tarquin’s setting up two families under his roof. Installing the woman Quentin loved as the mother of one of them.

  Juliana was no longer in any doubt that Quentin loved Lydia Melton, and she suspected his love was reciprocated. Tarquin had admitted that he did not love Lydia, yet he was her betrothed. There must be a way to sort out this tangle. Quentin was not quite such a magnificent catch as his brother, but he was still the younger son of a duke, wealthy in his own right, and clearly destined for great things in the Church. He would be an excellent match for Lydia—once her engagement to Tarquin could be broken off.

  But that would leave Tarquin without a wife. Without a mother for his legitimate heirs.

  A problem for another day. She remounted with Ted’s assistance, waved a cheerful farewell to Quentin and his lady, and trotted off. “Have you known the Courtney family for long, Ted?”

  “Aye.”

  “Forever?”

  “Aye.”

  “Since His Grace was a boy?”

  “Since ’e was nobbut a babby.”

  That was a long sentence, Juliana thought. Maybe it was a promising sign. “Have you known Lady Lydia and her family for long?”

  “Aye.”

  “Always?”

  “Aye.”

  “So they’ve known the Courtneys for always?”

  “Aye. Melton land marches with Courtney land.”

  “Ah,” Juliana said. That explained a lot, including a marriage of convenience. Ted might well prove a useful source of information if she picked her questions correctly. However, his lips were now firmly closed, and she guessed he’d imparted as much as he was going to for the present.

  She dismounted at the front door and Ted took the horses to the mews. Juliana made her way upstairs. As she turned toward her own apartments, she came face-to-face with Lucien. Her heart missed a beat. Tarquin had said she’d never have to face her vile husband again. He’d said he would deal with him. So where was he?

  “Well, well, if it isn’t my not so little wife.” Lucien blocked her passage. The slurring of drink couldn’t disguise the malice in his voice, and his eyes in their deep, dark sockets burned with hatred. His chin was blue-bruised. “You left in such a hurry last night, my dear. I gather the entertainment didn’t please you.”

  “Let me pass, please.” She kept her voice even, although every millimeter of skin prickled, her muscles tightened with repulsion, and the hot coals of rage glowered in her belly.

  “You weren’t so anxious to be rid of me yesterday,” he declared, gripping her wrist in the way that sent a wave of remembered fear racing through her blood. He twisted her wrist and she gave a cry of pain, her fingers loosening on the riding crop she held. He wrenched it from her slackened grasp.

  “What an unbiddable wife you’ve become, my dear.” Catching a clump of her hair that was escaping from her hat brim, he gave it a vicious tug as he pulled her closer to him. “I promised you would pay for that kick last night. It seems you’re getting quite above yourself for a Russell Street harlot. I think I must teach you proper respect.”

  Out of the corner of her eye Juliana caught the flash of movement as he raised the whip. Then she screamed, with shock as much as pain, as it descended across her shoulders in a burning stripe.

  Lucien’s eyes glittered with a savage pleasure at her cry. He raised his arm again, at the same time pulling brutally on her hair as if he would tear it from her scalp. But he’d underestimated his victim. It was one thing to take Juliana by surprise, quite another to face her when she’d had a chance to gather her forces. She had learned over the years to control the worst of her temper, but she made no effort to quench it now.

  Lucien found he had one of the Furies in his hands. He clung on to her hair, but she seemed oblivious of the pain. The whip fell to the ground as her knee came up with lethal accuracy. His eyes watered, he gasped with pain. Before he could protect himself, she kicked his shins and was going for his eyes with her fingers curled into claws. Instinctively, he covered his face with his hands.

  “You filthy bastard … son of a gutter-born bitch!” she hissed, driving her knee into his belly. He doubled over on an anguished spasm and was racked with a violent coughing fit that seemed to pull his guts up from his belly. Juliana grabbed up the whip, raised her arm to bring it down across his back.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” Tarquin’s voice pierced the scarlet circle of her blind rage. He had hold of her upraised wrist and was forcing her arm down. “What in the name of damnation is going on here?”

  Juliana struggled to regain control. Her bosom was heaving, her cheeks deathly pale, her eyes on fire, seeing nothing but the loathsome, squirming shape of the man who had dared to raise his hand to her. “Gutter sweeping,” she said, her voice trembling with fury. “Slubberdegullion whoreson. May you rot in your grave, you green, slimy maggot!”

  Tarquin removed the whip from her hand. “Take a deep breath, mignonne”

  “Where were you?” she demanded, her voice shaking. “You said I would never have to see him again. You promised you would keep him away from me.” She touched her sore scalp and winced as the movement creased the stripe across her back.

  “I didn’t know until just now that he’d returned,” Tarquin said. “I wouldn’t have let him near you if I had. Believe me, Juliana.” She was shivering violently and he laid a hand on her arm, his expression tight with anger and remorse. “Go to your apartments now and leave this with me. Henny will attend to your hurts. I’ll come to you shortly.”

  “He hit me with that damned whip,” Juliana said, catching her breath on an angry sob.

  “He’ll pay for it,” Tarquin said grimly. Fleetingly, he touched her cheek. “Now, do as you’re bid.”

  Juliana cast one last, scornful look at the still convulsed Lucien and trailed away, all the bounce gone from her step.

  Tarquin said with soft savagery, “I want you out of my house within the hour, Edgecombe.”

  Lucien looked up, struggling for breath. His eyes were bloodshot, filled with pain, but his tongue was still pure venom. “Well, well,” he drawled. “Reneging on an agreement, my dear cousin! Shame on you. The shining example of honor and duty has feet of clay, after all.”

  A pulse flicked in Tarquin’s temple, but he spoke without emotion. “I was a fool to have thought it possible to have an honorable agreement with you. I consider the contract null and void. Now, get out of my house.”

  “Giving up on me at last, Tarquin?” Lucien pushed himself up until he was sagging against the wall. His deep-sunk eyes glittered suddenly. “You promised me once you would never give up on me. You said that you would always stand by me even when no one else would. You said blood was thicker than water. Do you remember that?” His voice had a whine to it, but his eyes still glittered with a strange triumph.

  Tarquin stared down at him, pity and contempt in his gaze. “Yes, I remember,” he said. “You were a twelve-year-old liar and a thief, and in my godforsaken naïveté I thought maybe it wasn’t your fault. That you needed to be accepted by the family in order to become one of us—”

  “You never accepted me in the family,” Lucien interrupted, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “You and Quentin despised me from the first moment you laid eyes on me.”

  “That’s not true,” Tarquin said steadfastly. “We gave you every benefit of the doubt, knowing the disadvantages of your upbringing.”

  “Disadvantages!” Lucien sneered, the blue bruises standing out against his greenish pallor. “A demented father and a mother who never left her bed.”

  “We did what we could,” Tarquin said, still steadily. But as alway
s, even as he asserted this, he wondered if it was true. It was certainly true that he and Quentin had despised their scrawny, deceitful, cunning cousin, but they had both tried to hide their contempt when Lucien had come to live among them, and then, when Tarquin had become his guardian, they had both tried to exert a benign influence on the twisted character. Tried and most signally failed.

  For a moment he met his cousin’s eyes, and the truth of their relationship lay bare and barren for both of them. Then he said with cold deliberation, “Get out of my house, Edgecombe, and stay out of my sight. I wash my hands of you from this moment.”

  Lucien’s mouth twisted in a sly smile. “And how will that look? Husband and wife living apart after a few days of marital bliss?”

  “I don’t give a damn how it will look. I don’t want you breathing the same air as Juliana.” Tarquin turned contemptuously.

  “I’ll repudiate her,” Lucien wheezed. “I’ll divorce her for a harlot.”

  Tarquin turned back very slowly. “You aren’t good enough to clean her boots,” he said with soft emphasis. “And I warn you now, Edgecombe, you say one word against Juliana, in public or in private, and I will send you to your premature grave, even faster than you can do yourself.” His eyes scorched this truth into his cousin’s ghastly countenance. Then he swung on his heel and stalked away.

  “You’ll regret this, Redmayne. Believe me, you’ll regret it.” But the promise was barely whispered and the duke didn’t hear. Lucien stared after him with fear and loathing. Then he dragged himself down the passage to his own apartments, soothing his mortified soul with the promise of revenge.

  Chapter 20

  Lucien emerged at twilight from Mistress Jenkins’s Elysium in Covent Garden. He bore the well-satisfied air of a man who has relieved both mind and body. Jenkins’s flogging house was a highly satisfactory outlet for anger and frustration. The Posture Molls knew exactly how to accommodate a man, whichever side of the birch he chose to be, and he had given free rein to his need to punish someone for the humiliation of his debacle with his wife and Tarquin’s subsequent edict.

  His eyes carried a brutal glint, and his mouth had a cruel twist to it as he strolled up Russell Street and into the square. But it didn’t take long for the reality of his situation to return. He’d been thrown out of his cousin’s house, cut off from that bottomless and ever-open purse. And he had a cursed woman to blame fer it.

  He entered the Shakespeare’s Head, ignored the greetings of acquaintances, and sat down in morose silence at a corner table, isolated from the company. He was well into his second tankard of blue ruin when he became aware of a pair of eyes fixed intently upon him from a table in the window. Lucien glared across the smoke-hazed taproom; then his bleary gaze focused. He recognized the overweight man looking as if he was dressed up to ape his betters, squashed into the clothes of a fashionable man-about-town, his highly colored face already suffused with drink. As Lucien returned the stare, the man wiped a sheen of grease from his chin with his sleeve and pushed back his chair.

  He made his ponderous and unsteady way through the crowded tables and arrived in Lucien’s corner. “Beggin’ your pardon, my lord, but I happened to be here last even when you were selling your wife,” George began, as intimidated by the death’s-head stare and the man’s sickly, greenish pallor as he was by the depthless malice in the sunken eyes.

  “I remember,” Lucien said grudgingly. “Five hundred pounds you offered for her. Fancied her, did you?”

  “Is she truly your wife, sir?” George couldn’t disguise the urgency of his question, and Lucien’s eyes sharpened.

  He buried his nose in his tankard before saying, “What’s it to you, may I ask?”

  George started to pull back a chair, but the viscount’s expression forbade it. He remained standing awkwardly. “I believe I know her,” he said.

  “Oh, I should think you and half London knew her,” Lucien responded with a shrug. “She came from a whorehouse, after all.”

  “I thought so.” George’s flush deepened with excitement. “She’s not truly your wife, then. A Fleet marriage, perhaps?”

  “No such luck.” Lucien laughed unpleasantly. “I assure you she’s Lady Edgecombe all right and tight. My cursed cousin made sure of that. A plague on him!” He took up his tankard again.

  George was nonplussed. His disappointment at hearing that Juliana was legally wed was so great that for a moment he could think of nothing to say. He’d convinced himself that she couldn’t possibly be what she seemed, and now all his plans came crashing around his ears like the proverbial house of cards.

  “So why are you so interested in the whore?” Lucien demanded.

  George licked his dry lips. “She murdered my father.”

  “Oh, did she now?” Lucien sat up, his eyes suddenly alive. “Well, that doesn’t surprise me. She half killed me this afternoon. If I had my way, I’d put a scold’s bridle on her, strap her in the ducking chair, and drown her!”

  George nodded, his little eyes glittering. “She’s a murderess. I won’t rest until I see her burn.”

  “Take a seat, dear fellow.” Lucien gestured to the chair and bellowed at a potboy, “A bottle of burgundy here, you idle lout!” He leaned back in his chair and surveyed George thoughtfully. “It seems we have a desire in common. Tell me all about my dear wife’s sordid history.”

  George leaned forward, dropping his voice confidentially. Lucien listened to the tale, his expression unmoving, drinking his way steadily through the bottle, for the most part forgetting to refill the other man’s glass. He had no difficulty reading the lust behind Ridge’s desire for vengeance, and he knew it could be put to good use. The man was a country-bred oaf, with no subtlety. But when the twin devils of lust and vengeance drove a man, he could be an invincible enemy under proper direction. A most valuable tool.

  If Lucien could expose Juliana, could see her quivering in the dock to receive the death sentence, Tarquin’s disgrace would be almost as devastating as the girl’s. His damnable pride would crumble in the dust. He’d be the jesting stock of London.

  George finished the story and drained his glass. “I thought I would tell the duke first,” he said, looking mournfully at the empty bottle. “Expose Juliana to him and see what he says.”

  Lucien shook his head. “Depend upon it, he knows it all.”

  George pointedly picked up the empty bottle and upended it into his glass. “How can you be sure?”

  “Because he as good as told me.” Lucien finally beckoned the potboy for another bottle. “Told me the harlot would do his bidding. Thought then he must have something on her. Something to hold over her.” His voice was becoming increasingly slurred, but the spite in his eyes grew more pronounced.

  “If I laid a charge against her,” George said eagerly, “if I did that, she’d have to answer it, even if she denied that she was who she was. But if I could get her guardians to identify her as well as myself, well, surely that should convince the magistrates.”

  Lucien looked doubtful. “Problem is, Tarquin’s up to every trick. A man has to be sharp as a needle and slippery as an eel to put one over on him.”

  “But even the duke couldn’t withstand the testimony of Juliana’s guardians. She lived with them from the time she was four years old. If they swear and I swear to her identity, surely that would be enough.”

  “It might. So long as Tarquin didn’t get wind of it first.” Lucien stared into his glass, swirling the rich red contents. “It might be easier to work on the whore herself.”

  “Kidnap her, you mean.” George’s eyes glittered. “I’ve been thinkin’ along those lines myself. I’d soon get a confession out of her.”

  George stared into the middle distance. Only when he had Juliana in his hands would he be able to satisfy this all-consuming hunger. Then he would be at peace, able to reclaim his rightful inheritance. He was no longer interested in having her to wife. But he knew he would get no rest until he’d indulged this cravi
ng that gnawed at his vitals like Prometheus’s vultures.

  Lucien’s mouth moved in a derisive, flickering smile. He could read the man’s thoughts as if they were spelled out. Slobbering, incontinent bumpkin … couldn’t wait to possess that repellently voluptuous body. “I think we should attempt the legitimate route first,” he said solemnly, enjoying the clear disappointment in his companion’s fallen face. “Lay a charge against her with the support of her guardians. If that doesn’t work, then …” He shrugged. “We’ll see.”

  George traced a dark, rusty stain in the table’s planking with a splayed fingertip. Red wine or blood, it could be either in this place. The realization entered his befuddled brain that if Juliana was in prison, guards could be bribed. He could have her to himself for as long as it would take. Either plan would give him the opportunity he craved.

  He looked up and nodded. “I’ll go back to Hampshire in the morning. Lay the matter before the Forsetts. Where will I find you, my lord?”

  Lucien scowled, remembering anew that he was now condemned to lodge under his own besieged and uncomfortable roof. “My house is on Mount Street, but here’s as good a place as any other. Leave a message with Gideon.” He gestured with his head toward the man filling pitchers of ale at the bar counter before taking up his glass again, partially turning his shoulder to George in a gesture that the other man correctly interpreted as dismissal.

  George pushed back his chair and stood up. He hesitated over words of farewell. It seemed too inconclusive simply to walk away, but there was no encouragement from the viscount. “I bid you good night, sir,” he said finally, receiving not so much as a grunt of acknowledgment. He walked away, intending to return to his previous bench, but he was filled with a restless energy, a surge of elation at the thought that he was no longer alone in his quest. He went outside instead. A slatternly young woman approached him with a near toothless smile.

  “Haifa guinea, honorable sir?” She thrust her bosom at him, her black eyes snapping.