They sat together on the sofa while Emily carefully undid her bonnet and handed it to Sylvie, along with her gloves. The dresser curtseyed and disappeared with Emily’s spring pelisse, bonnet and gloves.
Less had turned serious, and that was a side of him that few saw. Most knew him as a lighthearted though rather mysterious figure among the London fashionable. He apparently had no love life and no mistresses, or at least none that he admitted to. Some whispered that he had a tragic secret, a love affair that had ended badly, but not a soul could name names or dates.
But it was known that where he professed friendship, he was steadfast. Emily gazed at him with affection. She knew that the scandalous verse purported to come from the pen of the Regent had actually been written by Less, but she didn’t think that he knew that she knew. She didn’t mind. She had known from the first that it was a gentle joke that had gotten out of hand. Even before they had met for the first time after the long interval of years she had been aware he was still in London and had recognized his distinct style in the ribald, funny verse. Somehow a verse merchant had gotten a copy and printed it up, and some low sketch artist had accompanied it with a bawdy cartoon. Now, though, the gossip about it was over; the ton had moved on to another scandal, and her brief notoriety was over.
How her life had changed since coming to London just a little more than a month before. She had been complaining to Dodo about the sameness of life, but she certainly could not make that same complaint now. She blessed the whim that had brought her, for it had brought her back to Baxter.
“Why so serious, Less?” She laid her hand on his.
His thin, clever face twisted into a wry smile. “Oh, I have any number of reasons for a somber outlook, my dear, among them a visit to my dreaded Great-aunt Sybil. She was in full raging vigor and I had to listen to the story of her life—all her stage triumphs and the number of young bucks and beaux she bedded in her scandalous career as an actress and courtesan—before she got down to the business at hand. She would have me believe that Farmer George was an admirer,” he said, referencing the late mad king, “but I told her she had gone too far.”
A burble of laughter welled up in Emily. “And what did you discover?”
“Oh, you can laugh! You didn’t suffer through it.” His smile turned grim and he turned his hand palm up and clasped her hand. He kissed it. “I am afraid that what I have to say may cause you pain.”
A pinprick of presentiment prodded Emily. Last night she would have sworn that Etienne was exactly what he seemed, a harmless, flirtatious, sweet Gallic youth. But now . . . “Don’t tease, Less. What have you learned?”
“Our young Frenchman is not the Vicomte Etienne Marchant.”
“What?”
“Hugo Etienne Marchant—who by the way was not commonly called Etienne, but rather Hugo—the only male in his immediate family, the last child of his parents and scion of the Marchant line before the Terror killed them, died with his family. They were victims of the mob’s resentment, as were so many of the aristocracy.”
“Less, Etienne told me last night about his parents’ death at the hands of the mob. He was just a baby and his nurse saved him. She hid him and then passed him off as her own baby. Isn’t that possible?”
“No, my dear. Hugo Etienne Marchant was a lad of twelve in the worst year of the Terror. That would make him . . .” He did some rapid calculation from 1793 to 1816. “Thirty-five. Do you believe the fellow is thirty-five?”
Emily’s heart dipped, sliding down the slope of trust into the valley of disappointment. Etienne was twenty-four; he had told her so himself. He would have been just one year old in 1793. “And you are sure of this?”
“My great-aunt is many things, but she is never mistaken. The old crone is a veritable warehouse of accurate information on both the French and English aristocracy. It is a pastime of hers, to chart the rise and fall of families. The current vicomte, a cousin of the Marchant line who does not carry the Marchant name, lives in Italy, even though he could return to France. He is an ‘Artist,’ it appears.”
“So Etienne is at least a liar and probably an assassin.”
“It appears so.”
“Who do you think he works for?”
Less shrugged. “If Baxter wasn’t being so reticent I might know, but he hasn’t said anything to me.”
Emily flushed deeply and sighed. “Do you think . . . would he have said anything to his mistress?”
“The little Belle?” He mused, eyebrows drawn down over his light, intelligent eyes. “You know, she traveled with him in Europe,” he said slowly. “If anyone has firsthand information, it would be she. Would you like me to speak with her? After all, she works for one of my acting troupes.”
Stiffening her back, sitting up straight and smoothing her dress over her stomach, Emily said, “No. Let me do it, Less. I would like to talk to the child anyway.”
Less looked doubtful but did not have time to protest. Trumble opened the doors and announced, “The Dowager Marchioness, Lady Marie Sedgely.”
Her mother-in-law swept in, swathed in furs that she refused to give up. She stood and glared at them. “Where is my son?”
“Why do you think I would know, Mother?” Emily stood out of respect for the woman, although she couldn’t abide her and it was mutual.
“I wasn’t speaking to you, I was speaking to him!” She pointed at Less.
Less sat back, one lean leg crossed elegantly over the other. He did not even make the courtesy gesture of standing as she entered the room. He raised a quizzing glass to his eye, making the orb enormous. “My lady, I have no idea where your son is.”
The dowager sniffed and then turned to her daughter-in-law. “I wish to speak to Dianne,” she commanded.
“Dodo is out visiting an old school friend,” Emily said.
“Wouldn’t think any of them would still be alive,” the older woman said. She glared at Emily. “Have you started?”
“Started?” Emily wildly tried to imagine what the woman was talking about. Sometimes she thought that Baxter’s mother was just the slightest bit mad.
“Started! Started losing weight, to get my son back!” She raised her lorgnette and studied Emily up and down, examining each rounded curve visible through the form-skimming fashion she wore. “You haven’t. You’ll never get him this way, my girl. He has a thin little mistress and you must compete. Must get yourself trim! Then after you have him back, you can get fat. After you get with child. The succession!” she trumpeted, one hand raised, then turned on her heel and left.
Emily broke into laughter, joined by Less. She plunked down beside him on the sofa again.
“The woman is completely pulled about in the upper stories! Mad!” Less held his ribs and wiped his eyes with his free hand.
“Attics to let!”
Less grew serious. “Well, I suppose that was the farce. We shall do things in reverse order and move to the drama. What are we going to do about Baxter?”
“Is there nothing else your contact in the government can find out?”
He sighed and stared out the window at the park across the street. “He . . . my contact is very worried about compromising himself. He is in a precarious position, and I must not do anything to endanger him. I would not do that to him for the world.”
Emily gazed at him. There was an odd note in his voice, one she had never heard before. It made her wonder if one of her suspicions about her friend was correct. It would explain so many things. She abandoned that line of thought. It was, after all, Less’s private business. “Then you must just do the best you can. And I . . . I shall visit Belle Gallant. She must love Baxter and want the best for him. Who could not?”
After Less departed Emily restlessly moved from room to room. She picked at her luncheon and then hovered near the front entrance, rearranging the flowers in the vase and glancing at the door every few seconds. And the clock ticked, the sonorous gong marking the passing hours.
He must have
gotten busy, she thought. He left a message saying he would come and her husband always kept his word. He must have just gotten busy. But he did not come, nor did a message arrive explaining his lateness or making a new appointment. Finally she went up to dress for dinner and listened as Dodo chatted through that meal about her friend. Emily was unaware that all the while her aunt was darting worried little glances her way, nor was she aware that the woman some condemned as stiff and high in the instep would later grill the butler about her niece’s unhappiness.
Sick with worry and dread Emily went up to bed, sending word that she would not be going out that evening after all. There was no event in the world that could pull her away from her own home and the hope that she might receive a message or visit.
But Baxter never came.
Chapter Fifteen
Baxter wasn’t responding to her messages and even a bold visit to his home had gotten her only the cold and formal “not receiving visitors.” Several days had passed. Emily had been assured that the latest attack, in front of her town house, had done him no lasting damage. This information had come from Dodo, who had seen her nephew in the park escorting Belle in his new phaeton.
It hurt deeply that he had evidently had a change of heart since his night with her. He couldn’t even be man enough to tell her to her face, but had to hide and avoid her. She would have sworn that the lovemaking had been as fulfilling for him as it had been for her. And not only that, it had seemed as if he loved her, really loved her, not just physically but with his whole heart. She ached inside with desolation, finding it was worse now that the memories of him were fresh and beautiful. It was like a particularly vivid dream, the memory of waking up to him and loving him in the dim and rainy morning hours.
And there wasn’t a soul to whom she could complain. She had told no one about their night together and wouldn’t now for the world. It might be the last memory she ever had of him, so she would tuck it away in her heart to cherish forever.
Damn the man, anyway! How could he do this to her? She had sworn to never again let mistaken assumptions come between them, but how else could one take this rejection?
In the meantime Etienne had been importunate, visiting her house every afternoon and sending notes and flowers every morning, but she couldn’t bear to see him alone and so did not go out herself even in the evening. She stayed home most nights and read or did needlework, and after a while she stayed home so she would not meet Baxter, as well as to avoid Etienne. She even started talking about going back to Yorkshire early, assuring Dodo that she was welcome to stay at Delafont House as long as she wanted.
She went to church on Sunday and prayed after the service, in the cool dimness near the altar. She prayed for Baxter’s safety and she prayed for herself, that she would find peace and that her heart would be healed. She found her appetite almost gone and wryly laughed to herself that her mother-in-law might get her wish after all, at least about the weight loss part, if this tension and unhappiness kept up.
There was only one thing to do. It was time to tackle a task she was not looking forward to but knew she must do. She had to go visit her husband’s mistress. Maybe Belle Gallant could protect Baxter, could convince him to keep himself safe, where his wife could not.
• • •
Belle lay back on the silky sheets of her red velvet-draped bed. Another cramp razored a sharp pain through her lower belly and she waited for it to subside. Her little maid came in with a tray of tea and toast, setting it down on a table by her bed.
“Fanny,” she moaned, pressing on her abdomen, “I will see no one today.”
Fanny bobbed a curtsey and left the room.
Tears welled in Belle’s enormous blue eyes and she lay facedown on her bed clutching her pillow. What was she going to do? Her plans were made and she truly did not regret them, but they were not proceeding as quickly as she wanted. Baxter had been everything that was kind to her and she must repay him before she could truly throw herself into the life she had planned for herself. Was a few months out of her life too much to give to the man who had given her everything? But how long was this going to take? And how could she manage it if he wouldn’t have sex with her?
A sudden fit of terror overcame Belle and she started shivering. She clutched her pillow, bunching the silky fabric in her clenched fists. Was she doing the right thing? Mr. Lessington had been so kind to her, giving her a job, and she loved it! She loved everything about the theater.
She was just an opera dancer right now with only a few small parts thrown her way, mostly because Baxter was her protector, but she watched the actors and actresses and felt in her heart that she could do it. She had even been given a couple of lines and a part or two, once as a fairy in A Midsummer’s Night Dream and another time as a silly young girl in a light comedy.
Someday she would be a great actress like the lead actress in their troupe, Madame DeMornay. She watched the woman move across the stage, confident and beautiful, and she memorized every tone in her voice and every delicate movement of her hands, to practice later in front of the glass.
Was she willing to endanger it all by bearing Baxter’s heir? Would her position be still waiting for her when she was finished with the nasty business and was able to work again? She buried her face in her pillow, breathing in the rich scent of the hair lotion she used. The lacy pillow slip was redolent of it and she loved the different scents of the expensive creams, lotions and perfumes Baxter afforded her.
And that was why she would do it. He was so kind to her. He had saved her from a wretched existence and lifted her from her squalid life, teaching her how to walk and talk and live like a lady.
Well, maybe not exactly like a lady. Belle turned over on her back and stared up at the dark crimson that swathed the full-testered bed. Baxter’s wife, Lady Sedgely, even though she was fat and old, had moved as though she was on wheels, so smooth and graceful. And her voice!
“Hello, so lovely to meet you,” Belle said out loud, trying the softer accents and rounded, plummy tones of her lover’s wife.
Sounded barmy coming from her. For the first time, she wondered what had broken their marriage apart. Baxter didn’t talk about it. He didn’t talk about much of anything with her. Not that she was one for gabbing on and on when you could be doing something, but Baxter liked to talk. He spent endless hours talking to Mr. Lessington and some of his other friends, even ladies.
Belle touched her stomach and wondered what it would look like full and distended, like she had seen on some of the girls in the bawdy theater troupe she had traveled with, after the manager had gotten at them. The randy old fart had babies with at least three or four different women. The so-called theater company seemed like a damned nursery sometimes.
Would Baxter be excited when he found out she carried his child? Of course he would. And then, after it was born, he could take it away and . . . and what? Whatever you did with babies, she supposed.
In her experience all women did with them was change them and breast-feed them, endlessly. She shuddered and gazed down at her body. At least she would get lovely big jugs for a while. That ought to be some payment for all the ridiculous stuff a woman had to do. Take sex, for instance. Sex was a dead bore but men seemed to like it and it didn’t take much time if you did it right. And having babies! Well, if you asked her that was nature’s biggest joke on a woman. First you had months of sickness, and then, just when that started to go away came the big belly and the swelling: swollen feet, swollen hands, swollen everything!
Fanny crept into the room and close to the bed. “Miss?”
“Mhmm?”
“There’s a lady to see you!”
Belle was about to remind the girl she had said no visitors, since the last thing she wanted was to see one of the actors from the theater, but Fanny’s wording stopped her. She sat up on the bed.
“A lady?”
“Yes, miss!” Fanny squeaked. “I told her you wasn’t seeing anyone today, but she just sai
d—ever so gently, mind—‘Then I shall wait until she is able to see me.’ And then she sat down in the parlor!”
“Did she give her name?”
“L-L-Lady Sedgely, miss!”
Baxter’s wife, come to see her? Mighty cheeky, visiting her husband’s dollymop. What could she possibly want?
Belle straightened her spine. If Lady High Muckety-muck Sedgely could come to see her, then she could descend to the parlor to greet her. Summoning every ounce of dignity in her small frame, she patted down her morning dress and swept from the bedchamber, down the narrow stairs and into the first-floor parlor.
Baxter’s wife wasn’t sitting. She was at the window looking out over the scene on the narrow street of a small child being tugged along by a large dog on a rope. A slatternly nurse flirted with a groom, not minding her charge as she should.
Lady Sedgely said without turning, “I would let that nurse go if I was that child’s mother. He is likely to be tugged into the street by that monster of a dog if she doesn’t have a care.”
Belle stood uncertainly by the door. Her loins had been girded to meet the righteous outrage of her lover’s wife and instead she was faced with a gentle voice worrying over a small child . . . a complete stranger’s small child, at that. And her tone was almost wistful when she said, “If I was that child’s mother,” like she wished it was so.
Once Baxter had said in passing that he and his wife weren’t able to have children. Belle had never heard of a woman being unable to have a child and had passed it off as an example of a wife fooling her husband while she used some of the preventative measures Belle had learned. Now she knew that wasn’t so. If ever there was a woman who longed for a child, this was her. Belle rested her hand on her stomach. If only them as wanted babies could have them, and them that didn’t, couldn’t! The world should be ordered that way. The woman by the window looked like she was made to be a mother, and if she truly wasn’t able it was a shame.
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