Shock congealed a scream that would have tattered her throat.
An embarrassing rasp of sound finally emerged from her. Her heart crashed so punishing against her breastbone that she touched the wall for balance.
She could have sworn the man was wearing…a doublet. And a cloak that he’d swished elegantly aside as he walked.
And…puffy drawers. Stuffed hose, in other words.
She was certain she would have heard another human being anywhere near her. Had another living human being in fact been near.
Her wits reconvened with the aid of a few deep breaths, and she found herself cleaved by two impulses: to investigate, and to flee.
Curiosity, that wonderful panacea against all things frightening, moved her two steps forward into the room before she fully realized what she was doing. She stopped, and wondered dryly if courage by nature required a deficit of sense.
Then again, despite all the other things she might have been, she was not, nor had she ever been, a coward.
She paused, and listened, and tried concertedly to feel whether anything was amiss. Whether another human was present.
Once again she heard and sensed nothing at all.
She was emboldened to inventory the room with her eyes. It was stocked with furniture allegedly plucked from King Henry VIII, according to the brass wall plaques—an enormous, complicatedly carved bureau, fashioned of a cacophony of shining whorled woods and propped on fussy gilded legs—surely one needed a ladder to reach whatever one kept in the top drawer. A crown? A writing desk as fussy and shining as the other furniture, the wood as patterned as the pelt of a jungle cat, an inkwell and quill atop it—looked ready for its owner to settle in and record the happenings of the day: Flogged serf for insolence. Devoured hart haunch. Ravished mistress.
The ravishing, she decided, must have taken place in the canopied and curtained bed the size of a barouche that occupied the center of the room. An uncompromisingly, arrogantly masculine bed, curtains titillatingly drawn about the mattress upon which surely hundreds of bouts of sweaty royal ecstasy had ensued. As arrogant as Captain Eversea, that bed. As potent in its confidence.
Before she truly was aware of what she was doing, Rosalind was near enough to touch it, apparently spooled forward by its sheer magnetism.
In truth, she hardly felt entitled to be in the presence of such a sensual thing. She stared for a moment, biting her lip. Then she stretched out a hand tentatively, furtively; she drew it back abruptly. And then she drew in a sharp breath and boldly seized the decadent velvet of the curtains and slowly, deliberately, wound her fist in them. She drew in a shuddering breath. Her eyes fluttered closed in deference to her senses.
And she remembered.
Not once had she…yearned for her husband’s touch. He’d made love to her with the enthusiastic and unimaginative rigor one would expect of a sinewy old soldier, and she could not truthfully say she’d loathed it, because there was much to be said for gratitude and ease and a warm body stretched alongside hers at night. But had he survived the war, she would have spent the remainder of her days alongside him carrying the burden of a tamped, ferocious…hunger. An awareness, a sense of infinite sensual possibility she never would have dared acknowledge or indulge again lest the regret prove more than she could bear.
Not regret over the indiscretion. Regret that she may have died never knowing whether desire that incendiary had anything to do with love.
Chase’s legacy to her. She could not say she was grateful for it.
But that tamped hunger needled her now, like a limb wakened from sleep.
When she tossed her head to shake off the torpor she could ill afford, she caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror: it was brilliantly polished but a trifle warped, framed in a network of gilt branches and satyrs. Her wavy reflection gazed back at her, and she could see, abashed, how very white her face had gone when she saw the man.
Ah ha! She must have seen her own reflection in the mirror, she thought, with a sense of Eureka. Not a man, for heaven’s sake. Not a bloody ghost. The movement of her pelisse as she turned—she must have mistaken it for a cape. She was a bit light-headed, after all, having downed just one cup of tea and crumbled a piece of toast into powder by way of breakfasting this morning, though she would eat heartily enough tonight.
Once she was convinced she was alone, it was suddenly difficult to shake the impression she was invading someone’s admittedly posh privacy. She began to back from the room.
“Sorry to intrude,” she muttered whimsically.
“Oh, it’s no intrusion at all,” came a pleasant voice from behind her.
This time her scream had no trouble at all emerging.
The Velvet Glove fit every man who crossed its portals like its namesake: deliciously snug. It was lit just enough to ensure that intriguing shadows filled corners, and carpeted and upholstered in silk, satin, and velvet in shades of rose and cream and beige, colors and textures evoking the wonders of nude women. Its carpets and chairs and settees—and mattresses, of course—were as lush and inviting as the lap of its proprietress, the Duchess. Her real name was Maggie Trotter, but this knowledge had mostly been lost to the annals of time. No one could recall how she had come by her aristocratic appellation, but then again, a good deal of forgetting went on at the Velvet Glove.
Chase was hoping to continue that fine tradition this evening, with the aid of a strong hasty drink and a woman.
“Captain Eversea.” The Duchess greeted him with the hushed reverence usually reserved for royalty. Chase wasn’t unduly flattered, as every man who crossed the Velvet Glove’s portals was given much the same greeting, but it was still undeniably pleasant. “It has been far, far too long. A year? Two years?”
Chase couldn’t recall, so he ignored the question.
“Duchess.” He bowed low, because this was part of the ritual, and then he kissed her cheek, because he liked her. Her flesh was dusty beneath his lips, and she smelled of powder and rouge and a variety of other female unguents. “Always a pleasure. You’re looking radiant.” The radiance was in part a contrivance of rouge and lamplight, but age, and her profession clearly agreed with her. “The coronet suits you,” he added.
She nodded regally and touched her hand to her complicatedly coiffed and hennaed hair, where a coronet did indeed precariously perch. “Thank you, Captain Eversea. It’s new. And real. Well, mostly real. A gift from an admirer.”
“Of which you have many.”
“Naturally.”
“You may count me among them.”
She tilted her head and looked at him for a tick of silence.
“You’ll forgive me, Captain Eversea, if I observe that your compliment sounded a trifle rote. Might I suggest that you’re a bit distracted this evening? Or perhaps you’re in need of distraction?”
Chase laughed.
And when he laughed, all the female heads in the place turned so quickly and in unison they nearly created a wind.
That’s when he realized that something was amiss: his was the only male laughter he’d heard since entering. The Velvet Glove’s front parlor, in his experience, was usually decorated with entwined male-female duos or even trios, giggling and whispering, flirtations punctuated by the clink and gurgle of spirits endlessly poured and imbibed, and the creak of the stairs as some man was led up, often speedily.
But now all he heard was low, desultory female conversation and, of all things, the pop of a faro box. The girls were seated around a table, and apart from the fact that their wares, as it were, were virtually as visible through their diaphanous clothing as delicacies were displayed in a shop window, they might have been matrons at a game table at Almack’s. One of the girls dangled her slipper from her toe in boredom. Another had her chin in her hand and was nibbling her bottom lip thoughtfully, examining her cards, brow furrowed.
“Good evening, ladies,” he said solemnly.
They each promptly struck a pose designed to reflect their best angle
s, card game forgotten. Some had decided a pout flattered them best. Two of them decided upon smiles. He turned to look at the Duchess, a brow upraised, and angled his chin toward the girls by way of asking a question.
“Oddly, it’s been quiet of late,” she confessed, her voice lowered as though a crowd were indeed present and would overhear. “There must be a great shooting party in the country, or some such.”
“There might well be. I can tell you that Sussex, at least, was quiet when I left it. I’ve just arrived in London and haven’t been to White’s, so I haven’t been freshly apprised of any shooting parties that may have sent the men away or scandals that might be keeping them at home rather than out at brothels. I’m expected at a soiree at Callender’s tomorrow, so I know a few diverting friends will be on hand then. Perhaps I’ll discover a thing or two.”
“Freshly arrived in London and you came straight to see us. I am flattered, indeed.”
“As you should be,” he agreed, which made her laugh. “Any unsavory rumors concerning your establishment floating about that might deter visitors?”
“No more so than usual. None that our usual crowd would spend a moment believing.” The Duchess ran her brothel as tightly and cleanly as Captain Eversea had run his regiment. “The crowd has only been a bit thin for nigh on a week or so. Perhaps a day or so longer than that? Please do tell Lord Kinkade that Marie-Claude is pining for him. He is her favorite visitor.”
“Visitor.” What a polite euphemism for someone who routinely vigorously pressed Marie-Claude into a mattress.
Chase suddenly wondered whether he wanted to press Marie-Claude into a mattress. She was one of the girls who had decided a pout suited her. It certainly did. Her pillowy mouth could tempt a man into writing her into his will, into doing rash, reckless things for her if she would only do certain things with it.
“I’ll…tell him.”
The Duchess noticed the direction of his gaze. “What can we do for you this evening, Captain Eversea?”
The “we’ had a whiff of appealing decadence, and she knew it.
Chase acknowledged that with a leap of a brow and half smile, and tried to imagine those four lovely girls transferring their attentions from faro to the needs of his body. But it was like trying to grasp hold of a reflection in water: the harder he tried, the more scattered and turbulent it became—the image wouldn’t take shape.
He was suddenly freshly angry with Rosalind.
Because not even forty women clamoring to pleasure him for forty nights could assuage the particular need that had led him here.
He’d come here to forget. But now it was clear that he first needed to make himself remember.
All of it.
“I’ll have whiskey,” he told the Duchess. “And keep it coming, please.”
Chapter 6
What the devil!
Rosalind’s head swung like a weathervane in a windstorm, searching for that voice. And then she saw him.
Or…it?
Gooseflesh rose on her arms. At the top of a ladder pushed against the wall near that enormous marionette was a…man. But at first glance he seemed indistinguishable from the puppet. His hands were so gnarled and brown they appeared carved of wood, his cheeks glowingly ruddy and as hard and round as if he were using them to store nuts; in contrast, gravity softened and drew his jaw ever downward. Now, as she took him in, the laps on either side of his face made him look like the marionette’s cousin.
His eyes were large, a peculiar crystalline shade of blue, and pouched in folds of skin. He was smiling, a weary sort of smile. The sort a marionette couldn’t accomplish on its own.
He wasn’t made of wood, after all.
She realized her hand had flown up to cover her overtaxed heart. She lowered it abruptly, embarrassed and more than a little irritated. She was beginning to resent the havoc this odd museum was wreaking on her nerves.
The man’s eyes shone with amusement. “My apologies, madam. I didn’t mean to frighten you. I thought perhaps you were addressing me when you apologized for intruding, since no one else is about.”
An easy enough mistake, since she had been talking to no one in particular, just like a looby. In truth, she likely would not have seen the man at all if he hadn’t spoken or moved. And this unnerved her, too. As though crossing the portals of the Montmorency Museum put one at risk of becoming an exhibit.
Waiting for her reply, the man applied himself to what appeared to be puppet maintenance. He tested the puppet’s arm joint as tenderly as he would touch a cherished human, not a lump of wood deliberately carved to be ugly.
Rosalind’s heart slowed as she watched the soothing ministrations.
“Oh, no, please accept my apologies,” she finally managed. Her voice was a bit thready. “I’m not usually such a ninny. It’s just that it’s so very still here and I…I thought I was alone. I was musing aloud.”
She quite deliberately did not mention the ghost. Or the hallucination. Whatever the man in puffy drawers might have been.
He nodded, as though this made perfect sense. “’Tis a quiet place, the Montmorency. One might be tempted to muse aloud.”
Good heavens. An understatement.
“Are you a caretaker here at the museum, then, sir?”
He straightened the marionette’s trousers over its skinny wooden legs with a tug. “Aye, but of the puppets, mainly, madam. My family has been puppeteers for centuries. And I do a bit of carpentry for the museum now and again, too. You were admiring the painting?”
He’d been watching her? Wait: watching her and Chase?
Had he been listening to them?
The fine hairs at the back of her neck stirred in distaste. She disliked being watched when she wasn’t aware of it, particularly in light of all that had happened recently. But she had to admit that in all likelihood she would never have seen the man if he hadn’t moved or spoken to her directly, such was his camouflage.
“I was looking at the painting,” she conceded.
He smiled faintly, appreciating her careful distinction.
“And Captain Eversea? He was looking, too?”
He must have heard her address Chase. She stared at him.
“Yes,” she finally said, cautiously.
“What drew you to the painting?” The question seemed idle; he turned away from her as he asked it, and was now testing the mobility of the marionette’s neck. He took it in both hands and gave it such a twist that Rosalind’s hands flew to her throat. She dropped them instantly.
“It…reminded me of my sister.”
Apparently satisfied with the head, the man retrieved a cloth from his toolbox, hiked the ugly marionette’s shirt and gave its smooth wooden chest a bit of a polish with some sort of pungent oil.
Rosalind was peculiarly tempted to avert her eyes. She was relieved when he pulled the shirt down again.
“Isn’t that interesting?” he mused. “The painting reminds me of my daughter.”
She was not about to tell him why it reminded him of her sister.
He was not further forthcoming regarding his daughter.
They regarded each other mutely for a moment.
Then he turned decisively back to his work. Next he applied the cloth to the lumpy wooden face of the marionette. She winced when he dug his fingers into its carved nostrils and twisted.
“Do…do you like the painting, sir?” She suddenly wondered what this craftsman thought of the Rubinetto.
He wiped his knobby hands on a cloth tucked into the waistband of his trousers.
“No.”
The word was inflectionless and immediate.
He backed down the ladder, each rung giving a squeak beneath his weight. He bent for the handle of a toolbox on the floor, gave her a short bow by way of farewell, and walked past her, deeper into the museum, without looking back.
By his second whiskey at the Velvet Glove, Chase was remembering the day English intelligence confirmed that the d’Alignys were spies for t
he French.
Lady d’Aligny, they’d said, was the niece of a high-ranking French official who had the ear of Napoleon and had been the source of information regarding tentative English troop positions. Doubtless she’d flirted the information strategically out of an English soldier, and Chase wondered whom he would need to order flogged. Or worse.
He wasn’t naive enough to feel any particular sense of betrayal where the d’Alignys were concerned, merely a fatalistic disappointment. War was war, and Englishmen were even now secretly, comfortably, moving through French society, mingling within Bonaparte’s inner circle, making friends, betraying those friends, and sending intelligence both useful and trivial back to Wellington.
And of course dancing with French wives.
It had ever been thus in war.
Colonel March had been philosophically, humorously grim. A battered old soldier, whip-lean, bent just a bit at the shoulders from an old wound, the colonel’s eyes were sharp but not jaded. Without his hat, Chase suddenly found his friend’s hair strangely poignant. Soft as cobwebs. Only a little of it left.
“We can’t suddenly refuse all of their invitations, of course, because it will reveal what we know and put our own men in danger,” the colonel had said. “They set the best table in all of Belgium. Better to know, aye?”
“Yes, sir. But what of Mrs. March? She’s a particular friend of Lady d’Aligny.”
“I’ll tell Rosalind to curtail her visits and impress upon her the reasons for it. She’ll be…greatly disappointed.” The colonel hated to disappoint Rosalind. “But she’s a sensible girl.”
It wasn’t the first word Chase would have chosen to describe Rosalind. But the colonel didn’t see his wife as clearly as he saw her.
Or perhaps he saw her only precisely as he wanted to see her.
So instead he’d considered it his duty to watch Rosalind, though he had scarcely spoken to her in weeks.
Two days later he’d just made an early departure from a meeting with the colonel and two other officers, Kinkade included, when he saw her hurrying through the foyer of their house so quickly her dress sailed out behind her. She glanced furtively about the foyer before ducking into the narrow passageway leading to the kitchen, which opened up onto the servants’ entrance.
Since the Surrender Page 6