Elisabeth Fairchild (6 page)

“Conceit, Lydia? You hold me in suspense.”

“An affectation only to be seen above the lips of the occasional powdered and bag-wigged old rue.”

“A mustache?” Dulcie tried to imagine Roger with a mustache. His mouth dominated those thoughts.

Lydia laughed. “Something far more provocative, my dear.”

Lydia revealed her news on the night of the ball, her cloud the color of jonquils, even in a darkness lit only by coach lamps.

The carriage wound its way along Tower Hill, behind the grim, gray walls of the Tower, from the less than fashionable area near the docks where the Selwyn’s took residence, toward the palace, parks and squares that beautified the most sought after properties in London.

“This comes from very trustworthy sources. Roger Ramsay’s valet, no less. Lord Thornhill’s footman told my coachman, who on occasion quaffs his thirst in the same tavern, that Ramsay wears kissing patches because he suffers a medical complaint.” Lydia smoothed her gloves and adjusted the tall, drum-like Caledonian Cap she favored.

“Not the pox!”

Lydia’s eyes gleamed. “Word of his condition spreads as quickly as the pox itself, and while the news has not exactly caused him to be shunned, the furor for his company among London’s female faction is irrefutably cooled.”

 Dulcie could not believe it, did not want to believe.

Lydia lowered her voice, yellow cloud grayed by the darkness of what she would reveal. “If not the pox, then some other complaint, my dear, of a sexual nature. One that he would disguise. Silk patches frequently hide pustules and boils.”

Dulcie frowned. “Are you sure?”

“As sure as one can be of a man whose name has been linked with Covent Garden brothels, a Drury Lane actress, and one of Astley’s equestrian’s.”

Dulcie’s frown deepened. Loath to countenance gossip, she set her jaw, unwilling to argue. To argue would involve mentioning Ramsay’s light, which evidenced no such tawdry couplings. She never discussed the light with Lydia.

“Are such sexual complaints serious?”

Lydia shook her carefully coiffed head and tsk-tsked. “Sometimes deadly, my dear. I had an uncle who went quite mad.”

“Mad?”

“Quacks treated him for years, to no avail.” The depths of her light intensified, thick as a shawl about her shoulders.

“I hope you are wrong,” Dulcie said earnestly.

Lydia’s color flared pea green, eyes and mouth taking on the sickly hue. “It is no more than the evil man deserves.” She sighed, color subsiding, and clucked her tongue, “Are you not very glad, my dear, such a man never pursued or presumed upon the acquaintanceship you struck up that fateful day at Carlton House?”

Troubled by a strong feeling of unfinished business in connection with Ramsay , Dulcie wondered if she was, indeed, glad.

Chapter Eight

The Preston Townhouse, London

Their carriage pulled to a halt, stopped by a line of carriages emptying passengers. Lydia leaned out of the window to see what caused their delay. “My, my! A good crowd. The Baroness worried for nothing. Come. We shall walk.”

Careful of their slippers, dodging steaming piles of dung, they passed along the front of the attractive townhouse, bright with lights and alive with the sounds of laughter, chatter and music. Beautiful, elusive music--melancholy for a ball, Dulcie thought. It seemed out of keeping with the jostling, ribald press of the crowd.

She was reminded of Carlton House--of Roger Ramsay. She must see him tonight. She knew she would.

Elegance to an extreme defined the house’s interior, lavish in gilding on door and window frames, sumptuously adorned with silks. They were met in the entryway. Footmen eagerly divested them of their cloaks. They were met, too, by the smell of perfume, pomade and punch, the distant lilt of voices.

Music sounded the only note of darkness. A plum colored thread, its heartbreak strung the guests together, drew them toward a drawing room, just as music had once drawn Dulcie, the child, into the fine, old country house of the Marquis de Puysegur.

“Do you see my light?”he had asked.

She studied him keenly, the question predictable. That he seemed genuinely interested, not skeptical, or condescending, or convinced he knew what she would say before the words were out--made him different from other doctors.

“It is too dark here, too quiet,”she whispered.

“Too dark to see a light?”

It sounded illogical, even to her. “It is a very faint light.” Her voice failed her.

“And noise affects its visibility?”

“No. It is just that when a person talks or thinks of something they care about, their light shines brightest. It is then easier to see.”

 He smiled at her, as if she had said something remarkably clever. “Come, we shall go where there is light and conversation.”

The ballroom doors opened before her, to a kaleidoscope of color and motion.

Lydia plucked at her arm. “My dear,” she whispered with excitement, her jonquil cloud radiant. “We must push through. A rare treat. Ramsay is here to play the cello.”

Mention of his name, his presence, slammed into her like a hard wind, knocking her unsteady. She could not feel him here, did not sense his presence. It disturbed her.

Through the noise and light, they made their way, into a growing darkness. Music thick as a mist, hung haunting and sad, a swollen, rain-heavy cloud of emotion dimming the guests’ pastel gaiety.

Crushed, breathless, yet undeniably drawn to the loneliness inherent in the music, Dulcie’s feelings intensified when she set eyes on Ramsay, head bent over the dark mouth of a cello, burnished copper hair rendering his features indistinguishable.

His light was different, diminished, almost extinguished, and still she had no sense of his presence. Yearning cut short her breath, not the knowing she had once met in his touch.

He struck a final note, head rising, the satin sheen of copper sliding from features Ramsayish, and yet not Roger’s. A familial similarity. He met their applause with a smile but Dulcie read no pleasure in the curve of his mouth, or the gray weight pressing hard upon this Ramsay’s head. Here lived despair, a soul oppressed, a melancholy to match the music, disguised, heavy, off-center.

“Rakehell,” Lydia whispered. “The most reckless of the Ramsay’s.”

Roger peered in the mirror at the eyebrows he had just fixed atop his own with theatrical glue, adjusted the lamp, and examined them more closely. They were bushy, unkempt, the hair a dark walnut hue, the color of Dulcie Selwyn’s hair. He had not thought of her in some time. It stopped the progress of his hand to think of her now.

“Ready for the wig, sir?” Quinn, quiet as a cat, just as fastidious, appeared in the mirror behind him, a drape of wild, walnut-hued hair suspended from his fingertips, like a dead rat.

Roger dismissed all thoughts but those in connection with the night’s work. “Quinn. I need two of you man. I am running late. What word of Jack?”

“Your brother was at Brooks’s, sir, losing at cards to a Mr. Lester Fletcher.”

“Wise enough to stop was he, when his luck ran foul?”

Quinn scowled at the wig. “By all accounts, sir, Master Jack lost heavily.”

“How heavily?”

Quinn’s even tone never faltered. “There is talk he lost everything, sir.”

The idea so unnerved Roger his sidebar went on crooked. “Damn! That is not straight.”

“Too low, sir.”

“And now?”

“Still too low, sir.”

“Not the hairpiece. Jack! Where is he now? On his way home? The money lender’s thugs will get to him before I do.” Roger wrenched the sidebar from his cheek.

“He has gone to the mushroom ball, sir.”

“Mushroom?”

Their gazes met in the mirror.

Quinn looked as unmoved as his voice. “Avery Preston, sir, a wealthy silk merchant, would launch his daughter in high society.”

Roger repositioned the false side-whiskers, dried the glue from his fingers on a scrap of linen and dipped into a jar of pomade. “What connection has Jack to this mushroom or his daughter?”

“It is not the Prestons, but their cello interested your brother, sir.”

“Good God! At a time like this?” A practiced application of the pomade slicked back his shoulder length hair, dulling its color from foxtail to sable.

Quinn moved in with the wig. “So they told the lad at Brooks’s, sir.”

Roger scowled at his reflection. Dreadful head of hair--just right for his purposes. He allowed Quinn to assist him in donning the familiar, odiferous, oil-stained, red-and-white striped jacket. Around his waist he tied a clanking, leather pocket apron. “Very well. Perhaps the scoundrel’s own idiocy will save him.”

“You are positive you would not prefer my accompanying you, sir?” For the first time that evening, Quinn allowed a hint of concern to color his tone.

“Prefer it, Quinn? Of course. But you are needed elsewhere, and Jack, for all his faults, is a better shot.”

A gun! The image struck Dulcie forcefully when Jack Ramsay brushed against her in leaving the ballroom. A gun. Swirling fog. A shot. A rat, too, she saw, and blood staining the pavement. Death clung to this Ramsay as heavily as it had his brother. Like doves taking wing the visions came to her, too fast a flurry of feathers to see the creatures clearly.

A carefree waltz began, but she could not be carefree with such an image to trouble her. Couples twirled, swirling colors, light and dark in their wake, dizzying, disorienting. She tried to follow the “Rakehell” as he made his way toward the door. The light, the laughing crowd, the music got in her way.

What to do? Why did she see this darkness engulfing Jack Ramsay like impending doom unless she was meant to tell someone, do something? Frustrated and spent, definitely out-of-place among the lighthearted, she said to Lydia, “I must go.”

“So soon? Surely you jest?”

“I do not feel well. Would you direct your coachman to take me?”

“You are pale. Have you the headache? Come, we shall go at once.”

“Really, Lydia. I would feel even more wretched if I knew I had dragged you away.”

Alone therefore, Dulcie stepped into Lydia’s conveyance. Alone, she contemplated the fog-cloaked darkness. The pounding of the horse’s hooves matched the pounding in her head. She leaned her forehead against the cool glass. What good in seeing, in knowing things, if she could not put the knowledge to good use? It was an old frustration, an ulcerated pocket of anger.

Hazy, corona-ringed street lamps offered little illumination. Certainly they shed no light on the conundrum that had plagued her since she first questioned her gift, as father called it, a gift that seemed more burden than joy. What level of accountability must she claim if Jack Ramsay took a life this evening, perhaps his own, and she did nothing to intervene?

Recognizing the intersection of roads they passed, an idea struck her, audacious and bold. Grasping the strap by the door, she rapped on the coachman’s trap. She had memorized the address from the corner of a six-year-old thank you note. She had picked it out on the map of London her father kept hanging on the wall of his study.

“Turn left, if you please, and two blocks north,” she directed. “Pray stop at number twenty-six Tudor Place.”

Chapter Nine

Number 26 Tudor Place

She arrived as Roger left, ladder lugged up the basement steps, tool apron clanking in the damp, fog-ghosted darkness. He paused beside his own brightly burning streetlamp at the sound of horse’s hooves, and would have hoisted the ladder again and gone on in his disguise, had not the coachman called out, “Number twenty-six, miss.”

He hovered, curious to witness who called upon him at such an hour. An informant? One of Mrs. Drybutter’s orange girls? Not likely, in a fine coach. Certainly his sister Aurora would not drop in unannounced.

Curious, he lifted his ladder and leaned it against the lamp standard.

The footman let down the steps, helping forth a woman in a hooded cloak of claret-colored velvet. Her skirts were lace, Russian flame, her slippers, too, flashing golden red as she ran. She cast furtive glances up and down the walkway, urgent, harried.

He mounted the ladder.

The coachman gave him no more than a cursory glance. The footman had eyes for none other than the woman, a vision worth watching, the cloak liquid in her wake, gown flickering like unquenchable flame beneath the smothering velvet sway.

A hint of pale skin. A wisp of dark hair. Anticipation gripped his gut. His best guess at who this might be, seemed completely unfounded, an idea born of desire more than logic. And yet, he could not douse the rising hope, the rising certainty.

As if she sensed herself being observed, her head turned. Dulcie Selwyn, as he dared believe, as he spent nights longing for. Here she was, come right to his door.

For an instant her gaze blankly took him in, sliding past--the gaze of any gentlewoman toward an inferior. A provocateur cultivated such looks by way of his disguises. The fewer people to notice, the better.

Roger wondered what color his mad moonling saw in him this evening. A part of him longed for recognition. A hidden, hungry, aching part.

Her attention, refocused on the door, left him wanting. Quinn answered quickly the bellpull’s summons.

“This is Mr. Ramsay’s residence?” Her voice floated up to him as he opened the streetlight casing, humming a tune Quinn would recognize.

Quinn caught sight of him and answered her politely. “I regret to say my master is not here to receive you.”

“Will you be so good as to give him this?” She handed over a flash of white, her words breathless. “Will you see he gets it with all possible haste?”

She raced back down the steps and into the carriage, a conflagration of velvet and lace. He wanted to call out to her. To turn her head, that she might look him in the eyes. He wanted to reclaim the peach and vanilla essence of her that had too long slipped through his fingers.