Vixen in Velvet

by Loretta Chase

  “To tell you the truth, Dulcie, he don’t trust you much,” Meffat said.

  “The last time I came to this theater, he trusted me enough to do the acting he wanted,” she said. “And then for only a few shillings, wasn’t it?”

  “A few!” Meffat said. “You know it was all the ready money we had.”

  “But you contrived to get more since you received my letter, I collect?” she said. “Because if you didn’t, you’ll place me in an awkward position.”

  What she meant was, she’d place Theaker and Meffat in the awkward position. Theaker wished he’d let Meffat give her money and send her on her way when she’d first cornered him at the British Institution. But as one with some experience in the blackmail line, Theaker had felt sure she’d come back and make a nuisance of herself.

  He’d decided it was cleverer to kill two birds with one stone: Take the wind out of Swanton’s sails and make Dulcie a partner in crime, so to speak. Who’d believe her, after she’d lied in front of all those people? She was an actress.

  But he’d underestimated her audacity and her skill at double-dealing.

  “You didn’t give us much time to raise the ready,” he said.

  “I haven’t much time to give,” she said. “And no place to hide. In this”—she tapped the carpetbag with her foot—“is all we own, Bianca and I. Meanwhile I don’t know when one of Lord Lisburne’s detectives will knock at the door or spring out from an alley. Then it’ll be the lawyers and writs. If you wanted more time, you ought to have managed matters better for me.”

  “If you’d been more discreet, you wouldn’t have this problem,” Theaker said.

  “Were you discreet?” she said. “Did you not promise me there’d be no trouble? Did you not tell me that Lord Lisburne—”

  “Hush,” Theaker said, looking about him. “That voice of yours carries, drat you.”

  “If you want me to whisper, you’ll have to come nearer,” she said.

  “Stop playing about,” Theaker said.

  “Or what?” she said. “Would you be here if you knew a way to wiggle out of it? A little trickier, this, than wriggling out of what’s owing to your child.”

  “Not mine,” Theaker said. “And if it was, I wouldn’t let anybody trick me into admitting it. Don’t know how you never saw what a conniver she was,” he told his friend. “But you couldn’t see beyond her pretty arse—and still can’t, by the looks of it.”

  “Dash it, Theaker, the chit looks like me!” Meffat said. “You said it yourself. My eyes. My nose. You were the one told me to keep away the other night. You’re the one said all they needed to do was see me alongside the little gal and they’d never believe it was Swanton’s.”

  “Will you hold your tongue!” Theaker said. “I vow, even now she turns you into a dithering idiot.”

  “ ‘Love is merely a madness; and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip, as madmen do,’ ” she declaimed, becoming Rosalind again. “ ‘And the reason why they are not so punished and cured, is, that the lunacy is so ordinary, that the whippers are in love too.’ Do you still love me, John?”

  “Ah, no, no, it was never like that,” he said. “You know it wasn’t, Dulcie. I never said that, did I, nor made promises.”

  “He only wanted to bed you, and you knew it as well as he,” Theaker said.

  “I was scarcely seventeen years old!”

  “More like nineteen and pretending otherwise,” Theaker said. “Still, you’re older and wiser now, aren’t you?” He advanced to the stage and slapped down the coins. “There’s your five pounds. Do we need to escort you to a hackney to make sure we see the back of you?”

  “No, I’ll take my daughter and be gone,” she said. She moved to the edge of the stage, but didn’t move to pick up the coins. “Only one thing—”

  “Devil take you and the brat both!” Theaker said. “That’s as much as we could raise. Will you pick our pockets?”

  She only smiled. “I only want to satisfy my curiosity. Why, of all the men in London you might have paid me to accuse falsely—”

  “As to that, who’s to say who was the father?”

  “But you know I wasn’t in France when he—”

  “You might have been.”

  “But I never was abroad. I’ve the handbills to prove it. In my scrapbook.” Again she tapped the carpetbag with her foot.

  The jade was playing her own deep game with them, beyond a doubt. More money wanted. Or something else? Theaker looked about him and listened. The trouble was, as she’d said, Vauxhall was very noisy this night. Even with the theater doors closed, he could hear children shrieking outside. Drums and music, too. The walls muted the sound, but couldn’t shut it out altogether. The noise of the festivities outside made it difficult to distinguish untoward sounds inside the theater.

  “Maybe we’d better see you on your way, after all,” Theaker said.

  She gave the carpetbag another tap. “Hoping for a look inside? But it’s not in there. Not enough room. You’re welcome to look. I know John won’t mind peeping at my undergarments.”

  Theaker started toward the stage. He reached up for the carpetbag. She kicked it out of reach.

  He swore.

  “So sorry to disappoint you, my good sir,” she said. “I find I’d rather you didn’t paw through my clothes. But don’t worry about the scrapbook. I gave it to a friend for safekeeping.”

  Theaker stepped back a pace, chilled. “What friend, damn you?”

  “That would be me,” came a woman’s voice from behind the closed curtain. It moved slightly, and the redheaded dressmaker stepped out onto the stage. She held a large scrapbook.

  “Was this what you were looking for, Sir Roger?” she said.

  For an instant, the two men stood stock still, jaws dropped. Their expressions were so perfectly theatrical that Leonie had all she could do not to laugh. Meffat’s face paled while Theaker’s turned an ugly red. Meffat seemed to recover his wits first, making a dash for the door through which they’d entered, but that way out was closed now. One of tonight’s performers, a circus strong man, guarded it.

  “What’re you running away from?” Theaker said. “A French milliner? Nothing she can do to you. Nothing she can say that anybody’ll believe. All the world knows she’s a—”

  “You might want to stop and think before you complete that sentence,” Lisburne said as he stepped out from behind the curtain.

  Theaker retreated a pace and looked about him. It was plain enough to see he had no easy way out. He could either surrender or brazen it out.

  Leonie was betting on the latter. He was a bully, after all.

  His color darkened another shade, and his voice grew louder. “You here, too, then? No surprise. Got you by the round, wrinkly ones, has she?”

  Leonie shot Lisburne a glance, but he only smiled. Had Theaker a grain of sense, he’d hold his tongue, seeing that smile.

  But no.

  “Thinking of going the way of Clevedon and Longmore?” Theaker went on. “Might want to think again. Any idea who your pretty vixen is, really? Who any of them are, her and her scheming sisters?” He laughed. “What a joke! You see what this is, Meffat? Desperate measures. They’ve got nothing. What do you care about Dulcie’s rubbishy scrapbook? How often do they print the year on a handbill? It’s all a hoax, don’t you see? Their word against yours.”

  Clevedon’s voice came from behind the curtains. “Newspapers print the year.” He stepped out from behind the curtains. “Mrs. Williams received laudatory reviews in the Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, the Bristol Mercury, and other English newspapers during the years she was supposedly in France.”

  Theaker’s color faded abruptly, as well it might, but he kept up the bluster. “You’re in trouble now, Dulcie,” he said. “Making scandal for an aristocrat. They’ll throw you i
n a cell and forget you.” He folded his arms. “If you were hoping to terrify me, Your Grace, you’re headed for disappointment.”

  “We heard you admit to paying Mrs. Williams to accuse Lord Swanton of fathering and abandoning her child,” Clevedon said. He nodded toward the others on stage. “All of us heard it.”

  “You heard. Hah. What did you hear or imagine you heard? A little playing about with Dulcie. The only proof you’ve got is that she lied.”

  “You admitted to paying her to lie about Lord Swanton,” Leonie said.

  “Did I? Don’t recollect.”

  “You admitted it in the hearing of witnesses,” Leonie said.

  “Not the most reliable witnesses, I’d say,” Theaker said. “You three have an interest in protecting Lord Swan-About. On the other side is everybody who saw Dulcie say it was him and no other who got the brat on her. If she lied then, she’ll lie again. Probably don’t know who the father is. She’ll blame anybody.”

  He tipped his hat in a mocking salute. “Most entertaining, gentlemen, ladies.” He started toward Meffat. “But if there’s nothing further, Meffat and I will be on our way . . .” He trailed off as he saw Meffat’s expression change. The latter’s eyes widened and his mouth fell open.

  “What the devil are you gawking at?” Theaker said. He must have heard the sound behind him then, because he turned back to the stage.

  The curtain slowly rose, revealing Lords Herringstone, Geddings, and Flinton, as well as Lord Valentine Fairfax, Messrs. Bates, Crawford, Hempton . . . and Tom Foxe, of Foxe’s Morning Spectacle. The last had a shorthand notebook in his hand, in which he was busily scribbling.

  Then Swanton came out from the wings. He stood a little apart from the others.

  Mrs. Williams kicked the coins off the stage and onto the floor. “You’ll need those,” she told Theaker. “To pay the lawyers.”

  “You filthy, lying slut,” Theaker said. His furious gaze went to Leonie. “The pair of you. Blackmailing c—”

  “You bastard!” Swanton roared. He launched himself off the stage and onto Theaker, knocking him down hard enough to make Theaker’s hat fly off.

  Swanton grabbed him by the hair and banged his head on the floor. “You two-faced, bullying cheat! What did I ever do to you?”

  For a moment, everybody simply stood dumbfounded.

  Then Meffat ran back to aid his friend. The others shook off their stupefaction, and leapt off the stage and into the fray.

  “Don’t kill them!” Leonie cried. “No blood! You promised!”

  She wasn’t sure anybody heard her.

  Swanton was trying to choke the life out of Theaker, and most of the other men were urging him on or making bets. But Clevedon pulled Meffat away and Lisburne pulled his cousin off Theaker.

  “By Jupiter,” Leonie heard someone say. “Didn’t know Swanton had it in him.”

  Later

  That was better than any play,” Crawford said.

  “You could have knocked me over with a feather when Swanton went for him,” said Hempton.

  Lisburne doubted anybody was more shocked than he was.

  Well, Theaker, possibly.

  Lisburne smiled. “Swanton has unplumbed depths,” he said. “He’s not as soft as he looks.”

  Not soft at all, Lisburne realized, except in his feelings, those tender sensibilities. In Tuscany hadn’t the poet walked along rocky paths up and down mountains with Lisburne? They’d crossed the Alps in miserable weather, and Swanton never faltered. He rode and fenced. He was fit, in any event, though not enough of a pugilist to floor Theaker in ordinary circumstances, as Swanton would be the first to admit.

  At present, the men who’d joined them onstage now stood with Lisburne near Vauxhall’s entrance. They were watching the Master of Ceremonies escort the not-nearly-battered-enough Theaker and Meffat from the Royal Gardens. This Mr. Simpson did with his usual courtesy. Without appearing to be ejecting anybody he smoothly led them to the gate.

  Some of the fête’s earlier arrivals were watching, too, and word was already beginning to travel round the gardens.

  Meffat made a shamefaced exit. Theaker swaggered out as though he hadn’t a care in the world.

  When they were out of sight, Clevedon said his goodbyes. He was eager to be home, Lisburne knew, to report the evening’s events to his wife.

  “I do wish Lady Gladys had been there to see it,” said Flinton as they turned back toward the fête and its growing crowd. “She’s always maintained there was something fishy about the business.”

  “There to see it!” Geddings said. “I should hope not. I blushed to hear some of Theaker’s remarks. Shocking language. Unfit for mixed company.”

  “Doubt Lady Gladys’d turn a hair,” Crawford said. “She’s surely heard worse. Father a soldier and home like a military encampment, hasn’t she said?”

  “Lord Boulsworth can make a sailor blush,” Hempton said. “That includes the King, or so I’ve been told.”

  The King had entered the Royal Navy as a midshipman and spent a segment of his early life at sea.

  “Lady Gladys will hear about it soon enough,” Bates said.

  “Everybody will hear about it,” Lisburne said. Even before Foxe’s special edition appeared on Sunday morning, the Great World would be buzzing about the shocking disclosures, and the cruel way Theaker and Meffat had taken advantage of a young mother’s desperation.

  Swanton’s display of outrage wouldn’t do his reputation any harm, either.

  “I’ll wager five guineas those two will be on their way to Dover before dawn,” Bates said.

  “Before midnight,” Hempton said.

  A short period of betting ensued regarding precise times of departure—until Herringstone pointed out that it would be impossible to ascertain exactly what time the two would flee London.

  That they would bolt for the Continent was not in dispute.

  By Sunday, if not before, Theaker and Meffat would find all doors closed to them. Should they appear on the street, their former friends would cross it to avoid them. Wherever they went, they’d meet with the cut direct. They’d be fools to remain in London.

  Despite Dulcie’s taunt, no one needed lawyers, as Leonie had pointed out early in the planning stages. She was, after all, a businesswoman, first, last, and always.

  “Without friends, they’ve no credit,” she’d argued. “Without credit, they can’t remain in London. Every tradesman with a working brain keeps track of the bankruptcies and scandals. I certainly do. I like the idea of those two men spending time in a damp, dirty cell—but I think Lord Swanton would rather do without the publicity of a slander trial.”

  True enough. All the same, Lisburne was deeply sorry to see Theaker and Meffat go with all their teeth intact. Especially Theaker.

  But it was done, and Leonie was satisfied, and she’d stood to lose most.

  Lisburne looked about for her.

  Bates followed his gaze. “Where’s Swanton got to, I wonder?” he said. “You’d think he’d hang about to say bon voyage. Or throw bottles at their heads. Or at least rotten vegetables.”

  When Lisburne had last glimpsed his cousin, the two women were towing him through the side door. “Probably gone off to find a quiet place where he can compose an ode to redemption or revelation or the death of illusions or some such,” he said.

  “If I were Swanton, I’d hide,” Valentine said. “When word of his wild avenger performance gets about, he’ll have to fight off the women with a whip.”

  “There you’re wrong,” said Hempton. “It’s his delicate sensibilities they love. Now he’s shown he has ballocks like the rest of us, they’ll have to take him down off the pedestal and treat him like anybody else.”

  “Stuff!” Crawford said. “If you think so, you know nothing about women. Did you forget that they cruelly aban
doned him when he was falsely accused?”

  “Not all of them,” Flinton said. “Lady Gladys said it was a hoax or a madwoman.”

  “All but her, then,” Crawford said. “But the others’ll be back, all weepy and conscience-stricken—and if you think women mind a man having ballocks, you need to make yourself a reservation at the asylum.”

  Betting ensued.

  Lisburne left them to it, and set out to find Leonie.

  Darkness had fallen, and Vauxhall’s thousands of lamps were lit. The orchestra played. Some visitors danced. Others ate. Most of the children had been herded to entertainments near the other end of the gardens, where they’d have a prime view of the fireworks.

  While she would have liked watching Theaker and Meffat’s ignominious departure, Leonie thought it best to get Mrs. Williams and Swanton away from the others. And if she was perfectly honest with herself, she didn’t relish hanging about that lot of men, given what Theaker had said.

  Swanton went with the two women meekly enough—or dazed, was more like it. Apparently, he was as astonished with himself as others were. He accompanied Leonie and Mrs. Williams without protest to a supper box, and only stared at the menu blankly until they gave up on him and ordered.

  The thin ham brought to mind Lisburne’s joke the other night. The wine was rather ordinary. But she was hungrier than she’d realized, and relieved, actually, to be with two people who required nothing from her, including attention.

  Swanton ate what was put in front of him, though he did so in an abstracted manner.

  Mrs. Williams reviewed her own recent performance, and imagined aloud the ways in which one might transform it into a play. The business at the end, when Lord Swanton leapt onto Theaker, would have an audience on its feet, she maintained.

  “I wonder your lordship doesn’t write for the stage,” she said.

  “I’ve tried,” he said. “But I haven’t the talent for plays. My mind’s too plodding and studying. My touch is too heavy. But you, Mrs. Williams, ought to write. The rest of us needed only to stand silent like the Greek chorus. Clevedon had the most lines, but he’s used to making speeches. But you—improvising as you went along . . .” He shook his head. “For a while I was so caught up in it that I forgot—plague take it! There’s Lady Bartham and her daughters. I forgot that half the world would be here tonight.”