Lady Sedgely turned and smiled, and Belle felt an answering smile tug at the corners of her lips. She wanted to hate her, this woman who had made Baxter sad, but she couldn’t. Not yet anyhow. That might come after she had spoken her piece.
“You must be wondering why I have come to see you. It was rude of me to barge in and demand to be seen, but it is important.”
“Not at all, my lady. Please sit down.” It was easy to be gracious with this pretty, motherly woman. Belle watched her move across the room—glide, really, not walk—and take a seat, knees together, rose-gloved hands folded on her lap. She copied her, sitting just so, clasping her hands in her lap, too.
“Thank you. I must admit, I was a little nervous coming here. I didn’t know what kind of welcome I would get. Or what kind I deserved!”
Belle stared at her. She sounded apologetic! She, Baxter’s wife, was apologizing to his little piece on the side. “I-I-I . . .” It was no good, she thought. There was no way to equal this woman’s breeding and good manners. Belle relaxed back against the sofa cushions. She would just be herself. It was all she could do and somehow she didn’t think this woman would hold it against her if she wasn’t a perfect lady.
“I am curious, my lady. Baxter’s told me about you, of course. And then we met that day at his town house. Whatever can you mean by coming here? Won’t it wreck your reputation?”
The older woman chuckled. “I have begun not to worry about my reputation. People will think what they will think and I can always go back to my home in Yorkshire if the censure becomes too great. But what about you? Do you not have parents who would be worried if they knew of your . . . um, situation?”
Somehow, after a few delicate questions from the marchioness, Belle found herself pouring out her story, the long sad tale of how she had ended up at thirteen traveling over the Continent with a disreputable band of players who pandered to the worst, most filthy tastes of gentlemen, performing lewd acts onstage nightly and serving the “manager’s” needs in the meantime. Halfway through, as she stared down at her hands and recited the whole sorry tale, half of which she hadn’t even told Baxter, she felt a hand take hers and pat it. At the end of it she looked up to see tears in Lady Sedgely’s great brown eyes. The dark irises swam and glittered and a single drop overflowed and rolled down over her cheek.
“You poor child!”
No. She hadn’t understood at all why Belle was telling her this! It wasn’t to get her sympathy, but to show her why this life was so much better. “But you see, Baxter saved me from all that! Two years ago, or so, he happened to see me one night being beaten for . . . for doing something wrong, and he planted that old bastard a facer and carried me off. After that, I wouldn’t leave him, even though he offered to give me enough to live on. I don’t got . . . haven’t any parents, not really.”
“How sad,” Lady Sedgely murmured, quelling her emotion with difficulty.
Belle shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. But you see why I don’t want to be anywhere else but here? How could I leave a gent like that what done . . . who has done so much? He hired a tutor, and a dresser, and . . .” She gestured to herself. “And here I am! He sent me back to England ahead of him with a letter for Mr. Lessington to give me a spot in his theater. And he set me up in this house, and . . . and everything.”
“My dear, how old are you?”
Belle sighed. “Age, age, age! You people think about it too much!”
“But you are very young to have been his mistress for two years. Why, you’re a child!”
The first bite of resentment welled up in Belle and she jerked her hand from the other woman’s grasp. “I am old enough. I have seen sights, my lady . . . pardon me, but I think I have seen enough to know that being a rich man’s mistress is the very top of the deck for someone like me. I was born the bastard of a drunken old poacher. I ran away from him when he couldn’t keep ’is filthy paws off me and became a squalid little whore in a third-rate acting troupe. Baxter lifted me up and made me somebody!” Her voice trembled and she bit back bitter words. Nobody would disparage Baxter, not in her hearing!
She expected Lady Sedgely to get up and leave after the unforgivable things she had just said, but the woman smiled, even though her eyes were still sad.
“My lady, you don’t understand,” Belle continued. The urge to make her see overwhelmed her with its power. There was no anger left, just this need to explain. “I made Baxter take me as a mistress. It was the only thing I could do for him. He’s so rich, and there was nothing I could give him . . . nothing except me.”
“Belle . . . may I call you that?” At Belle’s nod, she continued. “I understand a lot more now than I did when I came in. My dear, may I say that you were somebody even before Baxter rescued you. You must have been very brave and very strong to have survived what you have lived through. I underestimated you, and I apologize for that.”
Dazed, Belle just murmured a pardon. At every turn Lady Sedgely amazed her with graciousness and kindness. She had heard the upper crust disparaged as cold and bloodless. She had witnessed some of that in the months she had been in Mr. Lessington’s troupe, but it was made up for in the people she met like Baxter and Mr. Lessington, who had been very kind, and now, Lady Sedgely.
She wanted to cry. This was Baxter’s wife, the woman he had left, and Belle thought he must have been all about in the head. She had the strangest urge to rest her head on the woman’s bosom and sleep, cradled in safety and warmth, and she had never felt that way, never met a woman she liked that much nor trusted. In her experience women were either cats, hating you for whatever you had that they didn’t have, or whores with no more mind than a cow. So-called society women were just richer versions, she had thought.
But maybe there were other sorts, ones she hadn’t met yet. Maybe there were other women in the world like Lady Sedgely.
“I’m eighteen, my lady,” she offered, timidly, as a gesture of reconciliation. “Or nineteen. I’m not sure.”
“You are young enough to be my own daughter, almost,” she said and quickly turned her face away.
Belle watched the woman struggle for control. In a rare flash of insight, she understood that this woman before her still loved her husband. Whatever had separated them, for whatever reason they were not now together, Lady Sedgely loved her husband with all her heart.
“What is it like?” she blurted, giving voice to her inner speculations.
Lady Sedgely turned quickly, her eyes still moist with tears. “What is what like?”
“My lady, you love your husband. What is it like to be in love?”
“Don’t you love Baxter?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what it feels like.”
“It feels like . . . it feels like love. I don’t know how else to describe it. When you love a man, your whole being is tied up in him.” She hugged her arms around herself and gazed off into the distance, soft brown eyes dreamy. “You want everything for him, every happiness and everything good.”
Belle nodded. So far, some of it sounded right. She did want everything good for Baxter.
“And at night, when the lights are low,” the woman continued, gazing out the window, her voice quivering with a mixture of love and pain, “and he comes to your bed, you don’t want the lovemaking to ever end. Sometimes you think that if you could just go away with him, to an island somewhere away from everyone, away from his friends, his mother . . .”
Lady Sedgely stopped, glanced over at Belle and blushed, and Belle watched her curiously, then shook her head. If that was love, maybe she wasn’t in it. Lovemaking with Baxter wasn’t unpleasant, but it certainly didn’t do anything for her. It was best gotten over with, since men liked that kind of thing, and then they could talk about her career on the stage, or he could leave and she could dream about the future. Lovemaking that went on forever? Sounded like bloody hell to her!
Despite her efforts to bring him back to her bed since his arrival back in England, she di
dn’t really want to do anything; it was partly force of habit—as she had said, what else could you give the man who had everything?—but mostly to further her plan of presenting him with an heir. She couldn’t remember what happened the night she had come to his home drunk—had they made love or had they not made love?—but whatever had happened, it had obviously not taken, or she wouldn’t be getting her monthly courses right now. But then, Baxter didn’t know that, did he? Hmmm. That was something to ponder.
“Was that what broke you two up?” Belle asked, and then remembered something the woman had just said. “Was it his mother?”
The marchioness drew herself up until her back was ramrod straight. “Child, that is none of your affair, and if you know what is good for you, you will keep your nose out of business that does not concern you!”
Belle gasped, affronted at first, but then broke into laughter when she saw that the marchioness was copying her mother-in-law. Remembering the frigid dowager from the breakfast table the morning she had been at Baxter’s, she said, “She is an old fright, isn’t she? Right proper old bag of wind.”
Lady Sedgely relaxed and chuckled. “I shouldn’t say it, but she is an old harpy and a harridan and she interfered in our marriage constantly. Blamed me for not . . .” The pleasant smile was gone, and the sad look was back.
“Never say she blamed you for not getting a baby? Anyone can see that you’re mad to have your own . . .” Belle trailed off.
• • •
Emily gazed at her curiously. The child had an arrested expression on her pinched little face. Everyone raved about what a beauty she was, and she was pretty, but she looked wan and none too well to Emily. But the girl was engaging. She had expected a greedy little tramp, she supposed. Perhaps she had wanted to find that. But she couldn’t dislike her. She could be jealous of what the girl and Baxter shared, but she could not hate her. Belle Gallant was ingenuous and artless, openhearted and guileless.
“You know,” Belle said slowly, “I’m ever so grateful to Baxter. He has been nicer to me than any man, any person anywhere. But I don’t really think I love him. Not if what you say about love is true.”
“It’s true from my experience. I don’t know if everyone experiences love the same way.” How odd, Emily thought. She had come only to extract some information from the girl and they ended up having a conversation about love. She glanced down at her folded hands. “You probably wonder why I’ve come to see you.”
Belle shrugged.
“I have something important to ask. You traveled with him in Europe, didn’t you?”
“Yes. For about a year and a half, and then he sent me on to London while he finished up some business.”
“Did he ever tell you what his business was?”
“Just something for the government.”
Emily framed her next question carefully. “Did you ever notice anyone watching him? Or did anyone ever try to hurt him?”
“You mean when that bloke tried to kill him? That bandit?”
“Yes!” Emily nearly leaped from her seat. “Were you there? Did you see him? What did Baxter say about him?”
“Baxter didn’t tell me much of anything but his valet was worried about him. I saw him talking to some strange fellow, and he said something about Baxter having an accident. He was talking real low and fast so I didn’t catch it all, but I heard him say that, and the next day, Baxter got hit by the robber.”
Emily stared out the window. There didn’t seem to be anything in that. But why would the valet be talking about Baxter and an accident before anything happened? “What is the valet’s name?”
“He were a Frenchie, not the one that he has here. He left him behind in Paris.”
So that eliminated him as a suspect in the current attacks.
“Were there any other incidents?”
Belle considered that. “Well, there was the creeper.”
“The creeper?”
“We—Baxter and I—were sleeping one night and someone got into the room and was creeping around, looking for something to steal, I suppose. Baxter caught him and threw him out.”
Emily resolutely ignored the tug of pain as Belle casually mentioned sleeping with Baxter. It was not the girl’s fault that her husband was not home with her. “Was that before the valet said that about an accident?”
Belle nodded.
So perhaps the valet was speaking of that. Maybe he said ‘incident,’ rather than ‘accident.’ “Was there anything else odd that happened during that time?”
Belle shifted impatiently. “I don’t know. Baxter was gone a lot. Sometimes he would travel somewhere else without me. Sometimes he would have very late meetings. And once someone sent a message for him to meet them someplace, but they never showed up. I know that because he came in raving about it. But the next day it turned out that the fellow had been set upon by bandits and killed. Baxter was very quiet that day, though I don’t see why. It wasn’t his fault the fellow was murdered.”
Emily puzzled over all of this. Someone was trying very hard to kill Baxter and not succeeding. Was that because someone else was looking out for him, or was it plain dumb luck? She stared out the window, draped in heavy gold brocade. She didn’t really know very much more than when she had arrived except about Belle Gallant and her relationship with Baxter. She glanced over at the girl who shared the sofa with her. Belle looked a little green, her pale complexion blanched even whiter. She held one hand to her stomach.
“My dear, you don’t look well,” Emily said, taking her hand.
“Oh, but I am,” she said, turning a radiant smile on her companion. “I am very well. Or I will be anyway, as soon as ever I can manage it. Have you ever planned something and then wondered if you was doing the right thing and then out of the blue something tells you that you got it right for once?”
“I can’t say that that has ever happened to me.”
“Well it has to me. I was very worried about something before your visit, but now I know what to do. I know exactly what to do.”
Emily, puzzled, rose to take her leave. “I am happy for you, my dear,” she said, still retaining the girl’s small hand in her own. She patted and squeezed it. “I must say, I did not expect to like you but I do. You are brave, and resourceful, and Baxter is a lucky man.”
“Yes, he is lucky, isn’t he?” Belle looked up at her with a mysterious smile. “He’s a very lucky man. More than he knows, I think.”
Chapter Sixteen
Baxter ran his fingers through his silver-winged hair and sighed in exasperation. “I can’t think of any other explanation,” he said to the man across the desk.
Corpulent to an extreme degree, Sir Douglas Prong wheezed as he lit a cigar and said, “My lord, we are concerned. We fear for your life. But the nest of spies you uncovered was completely eradicated, we are absolutely sure of that. How can any of them still be after you?”
“It is the only explanation,” Baxter repeated, slamming the flat of his hand against the desk.
Sir Douglas’s ancient pug, as asthmatic as his owner, grunted and snuffled under the desk in reaction to the interruption of his pleasant dreams. The knight leaned down and patted its head, coming dangerously close to bursting a blood vessel or two. His face was red and his breathing stentorian when he straightened. He puffed on the cigar, indulged in a fit of coughing as he blew the smoke out, and then settled back in his chair, which creaked as he sat back.
“I have not told anyone this,” Baxter continued. “But that night, in Calais, when I was coshed so inefficiently, I had had the feeling that I was being watched for some time. That is why I was on my guard. But even after my attacker was driven off, the feeling did not go away.”
Sir Douglas sat absolutely still behind his desk. His huge round face and indolent manner disguised a sharp intellect and the instincts of a very good gambler. He understood “feelings” and “hunches.” They were what had led him to a position of some prominence, though most in the governm
ent didn’t even acknowledge his existence, in part because his bailiwick was spies. That is how Lord Sedgely had first come to his attention; the marquess uncovered a nest of spies within the inner circle of British foreign diplomacy. Sir Douglas understood spies in a way that made him suspect to others in the diplomatic world. The British government had their own spies, but it was not “gentlemanly,” nor quite acceptable. Sir Douglas was not gentlemanly so he didn’t really care.
“What do you make of that,” he grunted, referring to Sedgely’s “feeling.”
“I am being followed, I think. I do not believe they, whoever ‘they’ are, want me dead. What I am not sure of is whether they wish to warn me or whether the attacks have been kidnapping attempts.”
“Warn you of what?”
Baxter shrugged. What did he believe? He had had a dangerous few weeks in Italy when he discovered that a trusted envoy for Lord Castlereagh was, in reality, gathering information for the French. The war might be over and Napoleon safe on Saint Helena, but there were still many who did not want a return to royalist reign in France. And there were many more willing to take money from those who did not want a return to royalist reign.
When he uncovered the spy he had wisely not unmasked him the minute he knew, but rather waited until he could speak to someone he knew he could trust. Together they concocted a plan to draw the others into the open. Baxter posed as one vulnerable to bribery and the circle was decimated with the knowledge he gained.
But there was another, a shadowy figure whose existence was not even acknowledged. Baxter was convinced that this was the mastermind who was plotting for patriotism or money to rescue Napoleon and defeat the Royalists. Sir Douglas Prong knew all about his beliefs on this subject; they had already canvassed it thoroughly. But he always had the feeling with the corpulent knight that there was something more that wasn’t being discussed, some information he was not privy to.
Married to a Rogue Page 15