Kinkade was lighting his cigar, his back to him. Still lean despite his rigorous lifestyle of drinking and eating to excess, clothes tailored nearly to a skin fit. The look of a rake, but he was closing in on too old to be a rake and in a year or so his dignity would suffer for it. With surprise, Chase saw that his friend’s hair was thinning; he could see pale scalp through the blond.
Kinkade turned around. His face was pensive. He blew out the smoke.
“Shame, that. Naught I could do.”
“Truly?”
“Well, the fact is, old man, Lucy Locke has stolen at least once before, and I saw her do it. She begged me not to say a word. Deuced awkward, too, given that she stole from the hostess of a party we were attending.”
Chilling news. “What did she steal?”
“’Twas but a bauble. She’d secured an invitation to a party at the Burkes’—Washington Square, you know the place. Large party. Lucy was being taken about the ton by Delilah Moreton, who likes to surround herself with girls as pretty as she is regardless of whether they possess brains. An aesthetic thing, I suppose. Found Lucy in Lady Burke’s chambers palming something from her night table. Turned out to be a comb.” Kinkade pointed to his own hair, as though this needed further illustration.
“The thing you won’t be needing to use in a year or so.”
“Oh, well played, old man!” Kinkade was delighted. “Virile! ’Tis virile I am. The balder atop, the harder and longer lasting below. Proven fact. This comb was the sort ladies use to hold up their hair, like. An expensive furbelow. Ivory.”
“What were you doing in Lady Burke’s chambers?”
Chase was acquainted with Lady Burke. Occasionally she forgot to shave the hair from the mole on the side of her chin, and it seemed to sprout seasonally, like wheat. Other than that, she was quite attractive in a sparse way, and an acerbic and informed conversationalist, which made the hairy mole all that more startling.
Kinkade hesitated.
“Might have been I was looking for Lucy,” he confessed. “Juicy gel, that, and you can’t deny it, Eversea. I defy you to. After the dinner, I saw Lucy gliding up the stairs, trying to be sneaky about it. I’d had a bit to drink, you see. More than a bit. Saw her go up and seconds later I confess to succumbing to impulses ungentlemanly and followed her. Thought I’d…oh, steal a kiss. Get in a bit of intimate conversation, as they say.”
“How very unlike you.” Chase’s ale arrived. He slid money into the barmaid’s palm and she winked at him.
“Isn’t it!” Kinkade was in full, astonished, mocking agreement. “I generally confine my animal impulses to…places one should confine such impulses.”
“Admirably constructed sentence.”
“Thank you.”
“Had she gone upstairs to steal?” Lucy Locke was a bit of a featherbrain, but he’d never thought of her as larcenous. He tasted his ale and winced. Dreadful stuff.
“Couldn’t be certain. I think she was having a look around. She’s a mushroom, no other way to say it, always wanted to see how the trees lived. We all saw it, poor gel. If not for her face, she would never have been invited to places, and she hadn’t the wit to parlay her looks tactically. Unlike her older sister, who bagged a colonel and charmed a regiment and kept us all in line while we were at it, didn’t she? When Lucy saw the comb, doubtless she couldn’t resist it, as she never could have afforded it, and she could be one up on the rich gal. “Twas small enough to tuck into her bodice, and that’s where she put it. But I suspect she had the habit on her, I think—stealing. A bit of a problem, when one isn’t an aristocrat.” Dryly said. “If you get caught, that is. And she had gambling debt, too. Mayhap she was looking for something to pawn.”
Chase didn’t relish telling any of this to Rosalind.
“What did you do?”
“I told her to put it back, and she bought my silence by allowing me to retrieve it from her bodice. She’d had it well and truly tucked in there, too. Took my time about it.”
Was Kinkade serious? “Your suggestion or hers?”
“Do I detect a whiff of righteousness, Eversea?” Kinkade gave a sniff.
“That stink is your cigar, Kinkade.”
“Of course. Well, it was my suggestion, of course. I’m not a fool, I think on my feet, and she was too frightened to think at all.”
Kinkade sounded a little too pleased with himself.
Something unfamiliar crawled along Chase’s spine, a sensation subtle and new and difficult to identify. The idea of a frightened Lucy Locke, featherbrained as she might be, allowing Kinkade to root around in her bodice, wasn’t playful. It was repellant. It smacked of a casual abuse of power, rather than flirtation.
Chase wondered if he was getting old.
He tasted his ale again. It was still awful. “Do you know where Lucy is? Mrs. Rosalind March tells me that she’s gone missing, of all things. Can’t imagine it would be easy to get out of Newgate without anyone noticing.”
“It’s a wonder she went to Newgate at all, old man. If she was there—well, they’ve no record of it. I’ve asked, I assure you. I can’t find anyone who claims to have seen her there.”
This was unexpected.
“But Mrs. March says she visited her sister in prison. And an unpleasant visit it was.”
“So her letters to me have said. No one has a pleasant visit with anyone in Newgate. But Eversea, there are hundreds, thousands, of felons to track. Many of them are women. When prisoners die they’re shoved under with quicklime at Newgate right quick. The place reeks of it. Well, you’ve spent a little time in the godforsaken place, thanks to Colin, so you know. She might have been recorded under a wrong name. She may have been moved by mistake. She might have been inadvertently transported—a ship sailed to Botany Bay only two days ago. And then there are the hulks. There are actually women kept in some of them, awaiting transportation. Such are the prisons now. Mistakes have been made before, though it’s miraculous that we make them as seldom as we do. It’s unfortunate, I grant you, but then again, so is rampant crime.”
Somehow he was hearing this as through Rosalind’s ears, and it struck him as shockingly callous. If someone had spoken so rationally about the disappearance of one of his sisters, he would likely be choked with fury. He did understand Kinkade’s point of view.
Nevertheless.
“But Lucy Locke is your friend, Kinkade,” he said evenly.
A moment of silence. Kinkade’s silvery eyes regarded him levelly. “Define ‘friend,’ Eversea.”
It was lightly said. But a tense ambiguity swam beneath the words. Chase disliked it, because in his experience, nothing about Kinkade was subtle.
“All right. She was an acquaintance, then.”
“I’ve many of those, and many are pretty, but she’s the only one ever arrested for theft, a simple fact. I cannot lay claim to any strong feelings of loyalty, and I did make inquiries about her whereabouts, but beyond that I don’t know how I can help Lucy. How on earth did you hear about Lucy from Mrs. March anyhow?”
“Quite by accident my path crossed with Mrs. Rosalind March here in London and I inquired after the health of her sisters.”
It wasn’t a lie.
Kinkade was quiet for a moment. “What of the other sister?”
“Has a husband and a baby.”
“Felicitations to her,” Kinkade said absently.
Kinkade gave his cigar a prurient suck, as if hoping it would taste better the more he smoked it.
“Is she still something to look at?” he asked thoughtfully after a moment. “Mrs. March?”
“She is no gargoyle.” Chase wanted to protect Rosalind, to keep her from conversation.
“Rosalind March…” Kinkade mused. “Do you remember how we were all in love with her?”
“No,” Chase said flatly.
“I suppose you couldn’t see her quite that way—the way the rest of us saw her—as you were quite tight with the colonel. A dear friend of his family, an
d all that.”
Chase again thought he detected irony. But then, he was hearing the words through the filter of his own conscience.
“Let me remind you, Chase. She was a vision. Beautiful thing. Young, a corker, so lively. Lucky old dog, Mathew, rest his soul. Odd, we saw a good deal of the top of her breasts in those dresses, but I always wondered about her legs most of all. Had a birthmark”—Kinkade gestured to his collarbone—“here. I loved her voice. Used to love to hear her laugh. Was like hope, like spring thaw, that laugh.”
“Positively Byronic of you, Kinkade. My heart sighs.”
“I cannot tell you the number of times I imagined her tits.”
He knew he was supposed to laugh, but his back teeth ground together as he beat back a surge of something black and ferocious. And he was uncomfortable with the fact that he was suddenly uncomfortable with Kinkade, who was simply being precisely who he was and who he always had been, and yes, Rosalind March’s tits were worthy of any man’s fantasies.
He settled for smiling a smile he knew didn’t reach his eyes, and he was certain Kinkade noticed. Chase shifted in his hair, accommodating a twinge in his leg, and hoped his friend would ascribe any tension to that.
“Did you draw them?” he tried.
“Them” being the tits.
“In my mind, ever night, after every ball. But I never got around to recording my imaginings in charcoal for posterity, if that’s what you’re wondering. Nor did I save any of my other pictures.”
“Fear not, Kinkade. I don’t need to look at pictures when the Velvet Glove is but a wish away. By the way, the Duchess sends her regards.”
“Did she? How kind of her.” Puff puff went Kinkade on the cigar.
And then Kinkade swallowed the remainder of what seemed to be his third ale of the day, and winced.
“Pig piss,” Chase commiserated. “Marie-Claude is pouting for you, apparently. At the Velvet Glove.”
“Marie-Claude pouts for effect. Her heart isn’t broken, and I suppose I regret if her purse is growing slimmer. But one grows tired of the same thing day after day, doesn’t one? Covent Garden, brothels, gaming hells, horse races. One needs variety. Originality. To make life worth living. One must ever seek out new ways to not die of boredom.”
Interesting sentiment from a man who hadn’t seemed to change at all since the moment he’d met him, apart from the fraying head of hair.
“I suppose it’s why I’m going to India,” Chase said. “With the East India Company.”
“I heard you’d planned to do that. You call that variety, Eversea? Shackled to the army. Shackled to a woman,” Kinkade made a tsssking sound. “Why is it so many of our gender seem to need to be shackled to something? You’re a gentleman, Eversea.” He sounded indignant. He spread his arms wide, which was meant, Chase supposed, to remind him that the world was his oyster, his birthright.
“Structure, belonging, purpose, brotherhood, travel, excitement,” Chase said. “A test of what you can endure. Honor,” he told Kinkade, ironically amused. “Those are reasons.”
“I’d frankly rather know how much pleasure I can endure, rather than how much sleeping near farting soldiers in the mud I can endure.”
“You were the worst offender, if I recall correctly.”
“You recall correctly,” Kinkade said solemnly.
“You were a good soldier, Kinkade.”
“Motivated by interest in survival.”
“Not just.”
Kinkade seemed to consider this. At a table near them, a woman shrieked and slapped without conviction at a hand creeping up her dress, and the man belonging to the hand laughed and laughed.
Then Kinkade gave a short nod. “Very well, then. Not just.” He inhaled, with what sounded like impatience or discomfort. He contended with his own old wounds, less grave than Chase’s, but the scars on his back made standing or sitting for long periods of time difficult. He took a seat, turned it backward, straddled it.
“Some men are made by the army, Kinkade.”
“And some are destroyed by it. And one might substitute ‘women’ for ‘army’ in that sentence and it would just as easily be true.”
He had the distinct sensation that Kinkade was…not precisely taunting him, but definitely, deliberately, touching on sensitive places. Testing him?
Although he might very well, once again, be confusing his own conscience with Kinkade’s conversation. Chase was aware that his own weakness for one woman in particular could have destroyed his career. She had most definitely altered the path of it, and was in fact the reason he sat across from his friend now.
But Kinkade couldn’t possibly know this.
“Might one?” Chase asked idly. “Do you anticipate being made or destroyed by a woman, Kinkade? Reformed, and etcetera, perhaps? Don’t you see yourself one day leg—” He stopped. Leg-shackled made him think of the time Colin spent in prison, his younger brother’s legs dragging with the weight of the unjust chains, and he shied away from the term. “—married? You’ll need heirs to fill up your houses.”
“Oh, naturally, I shall take a wife one day. Someone mild, unobservant, easy on the eyes, wide of the hips, generous of the dowry. And thusly I shall continue to live as I always have. Choosing my amusements. I lived through a bloodbath, and I intend to ensure that the rest of my life is a monument to comfort and indulgence.”
“You’re a romantic, Kinkade,” Chase said wryly.
“It takes one to recognize one.”
Chase did laugh at this.
“Speaking of marriage, how is Colin getting on? One hears things.”
“He gets on.” He didn’t want to talk about Colin. Or cows.
Or, God help him, marriage.
He slipped his hand into his pocket just to feel the garters. He imagined for an instant they were still warm from her skin, the satin of them reminiscent of that creamy satin between her thighs, and the thought made the muscles of his stomach tighten, not to mention what it did to his loins.
He might have been soundly rejected as a husband, but the issue of wanting Rosalind March—and of Rosalind March wanting him—remained…
It cannot happen again, she’d said.
He wondered how honorable it might be try to persuade her to want to go much, much further than the event in the library. And whether that would be at all wise for either of them.
He wouldn’t talk about marriage or cows. But the garters reminded him of Rosalind, and he would talk about horses. For Rosalind’s sake. He fingered those garters, and knew that a small fissure had opened up in his solid regard for Kinkade.
Chase succumbed to curiosity, and he knew a way to begin.
“Speaking of drawings, there’s a painting of a horse above the hearth in your library, Kinkade—do you recall it? Tall chestnut, fine head. Is it Ward?”
“Aye. My father commissioned Ward to paint it. My father’s favorite horse. Brandywine, his name was. Won a derby or two. Sired dozens of offspring. I suppose my father identified with him in that respect. The horse, that is, not the painter. Haven’t the faintest idea about the number of his offspring.”
Kinkade was blessed—or cursed—with innumerable siblings.
“My sister Genevieve—you met her last season, yes?—is the lover of art in our family. She’s quite knowledgeable. Is capable of falling into raptures over paintings. I managed to avoid acquiring any education in art at all. I know what I like and what I don’t.”
“You always do, Eversea.” A faint smile here. “Always did.”
The barmaid ventured over to them.
“Have you anything that doesn’t taste like pig piss?” Chase asked in all seriousness.
“No, luv. You might want to try the donkey piss.”
“Bring me one of those, then.” He smiled at her, and she looked as though she’d received a blow to her head. Her eyes filled with stars, and she basked and basked in it.
“Off you go, love,” Kinkade said gently. He shook his head at Chase
. She staggered off, happily dazed.
Chase turned back to Kinkade. “Have you ever purchased any art? I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
“One doesn’t buy art, Eversea. One inherits it. It comes with the houses.” Kinkade stretched out his legs and waved out a languid hand, like an orchestra conductor weary of bringing up the violins. The Kinkades had houses and property simply everywhere. Two town houses in London, an abandoned theater outside Covent Garden called Mezza Luna, estates in Northumberland, Wales, Plymouth. They didn’t equal the value of Eversea holdings, as the Everseas had been property holders since the Conqueror set foot on English shores, but the scope of them was impressive nevertheless.
“What if you inherit a painting you can’t abide? Do you keep it out of duty? Is one obliged to keep every horse, dog, and homely ancestor? Donate it to the British Museum?”
Kinkade looked amused. “Speak for yourself regarding the ancestors. But I cannot imagine feeling strongly one way or another about a picture. I haven’t done a thing with any of the paintings; they’re all welcome to stay, as far as I’m concerned. Now houses, one has little choice in the matter when they’re entailed, is this not so? Or property. Damned expensive to keep all of it up.”
So he hadn’t donated a Rubinetto to the Montmorency.
Or…he was lying about it.
It occurred to Chase then that Kinkade had never felt strongly one way or another about much of anything, whereas he generally felt strongly one way or another about everything. And perhaps this was why they’d managed to tolerate each other for so long, and to call this tolerance friendship.
And perhaps this ability not to feel strongly was why Kinkade succeeded in his role in the Home Office. Yet despite his responsibility in determining the fates of so many, it occurred to Chase that his friend was strangely unmoored, and as such, as unpredictable as a comet heading toward earth: one never knew how or where it would land.
It might, of course, simply orbit randomly for eternity.
It struck him as a dreadful way to spend eternity.
But then, this probably described many a spoiled member of the aristocracy, untouched by the financial realities of their times, or by the struggles other soldiers endured in the wake of the war.
Since the Surrender Page 14