by Bee Ridgway
CHAPTER THIRTY
The next morning after a cup of coffee and a bite of toast, Julia curled up in a winged armchair in the library, trying to untangle a snarl of embroidery thread for Clare. Instead, she found herself blinking dreamily at the fire. She hadn’t slept after returning to bed, or at least not until she’d heard Blackdown and Count Lebedev return, soon after dawn. Then she had awoken again only an hour later, from a confused dream that fled the moment she tried to recall it. So she had risen, rung for the maid, dressed in her diurnal black gown, and taken her hussif down to the library . . . but now the armchair was so comfortable, and the fire in the big fireplace so cheerful. She nodded off into a delicious slumber.
Delicious except for that annoying sound . . . Julia opened her eyes, just as something white flew past her chair into the fire.
She leapt to her feet with a gasp, sending the little workbag and the thread tumbling to the floor, and spun to face the room.
“Holy . . . !”
It was Blackdown, and he was staring at her as if she were a ghost.
Julia looked at his shocked face, and then at what he was wearing, and she collapsed back into her chair, laughing.
“Oh, for God’s sake.” He came forward with a sheaf of papers in his hand, bending to scoop up what she’d dropped. He slumped down into the chair that was pulled up in front of the fire beside hers. “You scared the hell out of me. I didn’t see you there. What are you doing?”
Julia wiped her eyes. “I was untangling that snarl for your sister.”
Blackdown looked at the thread and then the hussif. He held the pouch up with a grin, displaying the sloppy J.P. picked out in irregular Berlin work. “Was this made by your own fair paw?”
“No, most certainly not—I could not set a stitch to save my life. Bella made it for me when she was twelve.”
“Why even carry it, then? Just to appear a lady?”
Julia rolled her eyes and held her hands up, and he tossed it to her, along with the threads.
She caught them, and stuffed the now more tangled mess down in among the few little treasures she carried in her hussif instead of sewing notions. “I carry a few keepsakes in here. A memento of my grandfather; it’s a stone insect, actually. And a funny twisty ring—nothing but a fairing—the only thing I have that was my mother’s.” She tied the ribbon around the hussif, glanced at Nick, and started laughing once more. “But at least I am trying to make myself useful as well as ornamental. What are you doing? No—answer me this. What are you wearing? You look like an enormous maypole.”
Lord Blackdown looked down at his brilliant red robes banded with three broad stripes of ermine and gold. “I know. Isn’t it hideous? They were my sainted father’s, and his father’s before that. The old buzzards at Ede and Ravenscroft had them in storage. It seems they knew I was coming back.” He jerked his thumb, gesturing behind him to the table. “There’s the hat. And the stick.”
Julia twisted in her chair and looked at his accessories. “Oh, dear.”
“Yes.” He slumped further down and frowned at the fire.
“So you are going to take the oath?”
“How did you know?”
“It’s all over London, apparently.”
“Oh, God.” He pushed a hand into his hair. “I can’t tell you how unhappy that makes me.”
“Why do it, if you find it such a burden? Most lords don’t darken the door. My grandfather stopped going years ago. According to him, arguing a point in the House of Lords is like speaking to the dead, in a vault, by the glimmering of a sepulchral lamp.”
“I’m sure he was right.” Blackdown stared into the fire for another moment, then he rolled his head to the side and looked at Julia. His morose expression transformed into a sleepy smile. “You’re pretty,” he said.
She raised an eyebrow. “You’re ridiculous.”
“Come sit on my lap.” He patted his thighs. “I’ll be Santa Claus.”
“Who?”
His smile faded. “Oh. Right . . . Father Christmas?”
“Are you foxed, my lord? Why would I want to sit on Father Christmas’s lap? And anyway, you look nothing like him. He wears green, and he’s fat and has a beard.”
His arm snaked out and hauled her, yelping, out of her chair. “Stop being pernickety. Come snuggle up.”
After a few moments of elbowy rearrangement, they were both settled in Blackdown’s chair, Julia’s legs over his, his arm around her shoulders, his sheaf of papers stuffed beside him. “Mm.” He pressed her close. “Your hair smells good.” His other arm found its way around her waist. “And this feels good.”
“And you feel like an unfortunate cross between a sheep and a stoat.” She stroked one of the ermine bands that crossed his crimson chest. “You smell musty.”
He put his head back against the chair and looked down his nose with mock solemnity. “I’ll have you know that these robes are the sign of my great dignity and magnificence and superior . . . superiority.”
“Well, then.” She moved to stand up. “Best if I leave you in majestic isolation.”
“Oh, no!” He pulled her firmly against him. “If I have to take the oath of allegiance, I need to be drunk . . . on kisses.”
“I am not going to kiss you here, at nine in the morning, with the door unlocked.”
“No? But what if I kiss you?” He suited action to words.
She smiled against his mouth, and a few delightful minutes ticked away.
It was Blackdown who pulled back. “Have you ever made a paper airplane?” he whispered.
“A what?”
He tugged a piece of paper from the sheaf that was wedged beside him. Both sides were covered in big, loopy writing. “A paper airplane. A glider, made of paper.”
“No. And what is written on that paper?”
“Nothing important. Here, let me show you.”
Julia was tucked lusciously up against him, her head resting on one shoulder, and he was able, with his arms around her, to demonstrate folding the piece of paper in half, and then in a series of angles, until it looked like the head of a spear. “That’s a paper glider,” he said. “You hold it like this, by this cluster of folds here underneath. You aim it. . . .” He pointed it at the fire. “Then you give it a little shove. . . .” Nick sent the glider winging into the fire. He made a sound like the wind as it went, and then a crashing sound when it wedged itself between two logs and went up in flames. He immediately began making another. “This one’s for you.” He folded it carefully and put it in her hands. “That’s right. Pinch it there, and then aim it . . . and let go.”
She watched as her glider floated away from her and into the flames. It sat for a moment on some embers, the undersides of its wings glowing pink. Then all at once it became a miniature inferno. She laughed and grabbed his knee. “Make me another one.”
They worked their way through the entire sheaf, sending glider after glider into the flames. Soon it became a rule that they must kiss until each glider was finished burning, and they both became adept at sending their gliders into cooler corners of the fire. But when Julia sent one deliberately outside the fireplace altogether, Nick sent her after it. “You won’t trick me into losing my virtue that easily,” he said.
After she had tossed it onto the fire and turned around, she found him standing and brushing his robes into place. “That’s it,” he said nonchalantly. “That’s my entire maiden speech, burned up. Like the Battle of Britain.”
“That was your maiden speech?” Julia stared at him.
“That’s right.”
“But what will you do? Do you have it memorized?”
“No.” He straightened the robe on his shoulders, then smoothed his hair with a hand, looking at himself in the mirror that hung over the mantel. “Mahvelous, dahling,” he said to his reflection.
“Nicholas Falcott! Be serious. What will you say instead?”
He turned from the mirror, and for just a moment he managed to look
dignified. “That I would prefer not to.”
* * *
An hour later Blackdown was gone, and the hallway was filled with the bustling return of Arabella and the dowager marchioness from Greenwich. Julia watched as box after box was unloaded from the carriage that waited at the front door, Arabella overseeing the whole operation; her mother had rushed upstairs claiming a headache.
“All of that for one overnight visit?”
Bella gestured to a neat pile of three blue bandboxes. “Those are mine. The rest . . . Mother’s.”
“Perhaps that is a good sign. She is interesting herself in society again.”
“Yes.” Bella looked doubtful. “Perhaps.”
When the last box was in, Bella asked one of the footmen to hold the horses and the coachman to come inside. He entered, his hat in his hand, and Bella addressed him and the remaining footman with great warmth. “I want to thank you both,” she said, “for sending that madman on his way just now. I would have been quite anxious without the two of you.” She fished in her reticule, took out two coins, and handed one to each man. “If I were a man, I would stand you both a drink, but you will have to raise your glasses to yourselves.”
The coachman bowed and left to drive the coach around to the mews, and the footman returned to organizing the luggage. Bella took Julia’s arm. “I’m so glad to be home, I cannot tell you. Greenwich was a bore.”
“At least you were able to leave the house and see the sunshine. Remember you are talking to a creature who must hide in the dark, wearing black, having miserable feelings for six months before she is allowed to wear the most odious shade of purple.”
“You are allowed to leave the house. Now and then. If you’re very good.”
Julia sighed. Sedate walks in the company of servants did not count, in her book, as freedom, and she knew Bella did not count it as freedom, either. “Anyway,” she said, “even if it was boring I want to hear every tiny detail. Come and tell me everything.” They mounted the stairs. “And it sounds as if you had at least one thrill—what was that about a madman?”
“It was the strangest thing. It happened just now, as we climbed down from the carriage. A man walked right up to Mother and addressed her. He was very formal, and exceedingly dour. Dressed expensively but in the most outmoded of fashions. At first we thought he must be an old acquaintance of Father’s or something, and Mother greeted him politely enough. But then he began to insist that there was a baby hidden in our house! A baby, can you imagine? He demanded that the baby be given to him. When Mother assured him in the kindest possible way that there was no baby and had been no baby in the house for twenty years, he became quite obstreperous, and demanded to see a man he called Altukhov.”
“Altukhov? That sounds Russian.”
“Yes, isn’t it curious?” Bella opened the door to her bedchamber and invited Julia in. “For of course we do have a Russian in the house, and what are the chances of that?”
“Then what happened?” Julia sat in one of the two little chairs that faced the window looking out onto Berkeley Square.
“The footman was very firm, and told the man to move along, that he had the wrong house, that he was bothering their ladyships, and all of that footmanish sort of thing that they say.” Bella unpinned her hat, took off her pelisse, and tossed them together with her reticule onto her bed. “It seemed at first to work, for the man appeared to calm down.” Bella checked her hair in the mirror and settled herself in the other chair. “But then”—she turned toward Julia, her eyes alight with humor—“I realized that for the whole time that the footman had been talking, the man had not been listening at all. He had been standing like a moonstruck cow, gaping at Mother as if she were a heavenly apparition. Which you must admit she never is, not even on her best days.”
“Your mother is a beautiful woman,” Julia said dutifully.
“Have it your way.” Bella flared her nostrils. “In any case, Mother stared back for a moment, and then—I wish you could have seen it—she clutched her breast and moaned. She stumbled up the stairs to the door, calling back to Coachman to drive the man from the door like a leper! Which Coachman did, by bellowing and flapping his arms at the man until he turned and walked away.” Bella laughed. “She actually said ‘like a leper,’ and her voice turned biblical. And Coachman . . . he looked like an apoplectic rooster!”
“But that’s all terrifying! Thank goodness Coachman was able to drive the madman off.”
Bella sighed. “I know, I suppose I ought to have found it frightening. Do you think there’s something wrong with me? But honestly, Julia, at least it was exciting.” She slumped down in her chair just as her brother had done in the library an hour earlier, and stared out of the window. Julia stared, too. Although she wasn’t actually incarcerated in London as she had been at Castle Dar, the effect was the same, for aside from her brief outing to Gunther’s, she had barely left the house. And yet, for all that the minutes moved as slowly as cold treacle, her life was far too exciting. Exciting—or perhaps she was simply insane, and was even now in the grip of a delusion that she could manipulate time, and that two lords were pursuing her with deadly intent. But . . . Julia smiled to herself. One of those lords was—to call a fig a fig—on the high road to becoming her lover, and she knew that he was real, for if she closed her eyes she could still feel that ermine beneath her fingers and taste his kisses on her lips.
Bella interrupted her reverie. “I think things are drearier now because my value has gone up.”
Julia opened her eyes. “Whatever do you mean?”
Bella’s arms hung down over the arms of her chair like a rag doll’s. “Oh, before Nick’s miraculous reappearance I was a wealthy match, but the title was extinct, so I didn’t bring with me a connection to a powerful family. Any man who showed interest in me was either a fortune hunter, which was thrilling in a piratical sort of way, or else he truly admired me, which was flattering and sometimes even slightly tempting. Now that Nick is home, my stock in the marriage market has risen, and suddenly the most dreadfully important and boring men are monopolizing my time.” She sighed. “You see before you a valuable commodity.”
“Surely you enjoy that. You are in London to catch a husband, remember?”
“I suppose.” Bella propped her slippered heels on the windowsill. “If only there was someone I liked.” She reached out for Julia’s hand. “I wish you were out of mourning so that you could join me. At least then I would have someone to laugh with over it all. Mother is blue-deviled, and Clare refuses to participate in the Season.”
Julia took her friend’s hand and swung it between their chairs. “You should be glad I can’t participate,” she said. “I was raised by wolves. Or rather, by a wolf. I don’t know how to dance, or play the harp, or anything.”
“All you have to do is learn how to simper. A good simper disguises all blemishes.”
Julia snorted. “You wouldn’t know how to simper if your life depended upon it.”
“That is why all the other girls go flying off the shelf and I am left behind, gathering dust in the shop window.”
“You just said you were a valuable commodity.”
“Ah. Do I contradict myself?” Bella wiggled her toes and squeezed Julia’s fingers. But her expression was thoughtful. “I wonder if Count Lebedev knows this Altukhov?”
“Ask him during dinner.”
Bella flopped her feet apart and then together. “Wouldn’t it be thrilling if the count were involved in some infant-smuggling scheme, and we were the ones to expose it to the eyes of the world? But we cannot ask him. He is gone.”
“What?” Julia sat up straight in her chair, pulling her hand from her friend’s.
“Yes. The footman said so. I told him to alert the count about the maniac, in case he did know anything about an Altukhov who might be hiding a baby. But Lebedev is gone. And not just for the day. He loaded up the second-best coach and drove off this morning, early.” She put the back of her hand over her br
ow. “‘Of joys departed, not to return, how painful the remembrance!’”
“Oh, Bella, be serious! Where is he gone? Is he ever coming back?”
“How should I know?”
Julia had to will herself to remain in her seat and not climb the walls. Devon. That was the answer. Julia knew it. Lebedev was gone to Devon to investigate Eamon. To find out if he was Ofan. When he got there it would take the Russian five seconds to realize that Eamon was a buffoon, with no more power over time than a broken pocket watch. And when the count knew that, he would start wondering: Who else had been at Castle Dar that day?
Bella was eyeing her with some trepidation. “Are you well, Julia? I know you are chafing after all this isolation, but please don’t start talking about lepers.”
Julia forced herself to smile. “I’m fine.” She placed her shoulders back against the chair in a semblance of relaxation and turned a rigid smile on her friend. “Tell me more about Greenwich. With whom did you dance?”
Bella shook her head. “You can’t fool me, Julia. It is high time that you kicked over your traces and I’m the one to help you.”
“Oh, no!” Julia curled her feet up under her and held on to her chair’s arms with both her hands. “You are far too corky, Arabella Falcott, and I won’t be led astray by you.”
“But, my dear,” Bella said, with real concern in her hazel eyes. “You would do the same for me, were I in your shoes. And take it from me: You are curling up at the edges.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
At eight thirty the following morning, Nick set out for Soho Square without a pang of guilt, although he had just sold his mother a bag of moonshine about how he was going again to the House of Lords. He was sorry to lie to her, but she had cornered him in the breakfast room and ranted about some gentleman who had the misfortune to look strangely at her upon her return from Greenwich. She had even set the coachman on the poor man.
Alva had told him to find her in Soho Square—no address, no description of the house. He supposed he would just turn up and wait. Kicking his heels in the square seemed as reasonable a way as any other to escape one’s whinging mother on the one hand, and the House of Lords on the other.