It Happened One Midnight (PG8) (9 page)

He was held captive in front of a shop featuring Italian confections.

For there, right in the window, nestled in among a number of different pastries, was a pile of fruit molded from marzipan.

And lo and behold, among them was what appeared to be a cluster of raspberries.

He smiled. It was an omen, he was sure of it. Surely things would go his way, despite his father’s threats.

He fished through his pockets, decided he’d sacrifice a few pence for the sake of his sister. Violet would laugh when she saw them. He chose several, and the shopkeeper wrapped them as tenderly as eggs. Jonathan tucked the little bundle into the inside pocket of his greatcoat, and turned to leave, a smile on his face.

And the smile froze, for there, with her hand on the door of the shop, dressed in sleek scarlet wool, stood the beautiful Lady Philippa Winslow.

Except at the moment her eyes and mouth were narrow slits. Which was unusual, since both were generally large and generous and . . . open.

Right now her mouth seemed to be trembling with the effort of holding back some sort of verbal earthquake.

“Philippa!” His voice thrummed with memories and enthusiasm. “What a pleasure it is to see—”

“You might have
told
me,” she hissed. And before he could blink or duck—
SMACK!
—up flew her hand and cracked him on the cheek.

It sent him staggering a step backward.

“The bloody
hell . . .
?”

But she’d whipped around and was already gone, boarding her carriage again, trailing a look of melodramatic heartbreak over her shoulder.

The shopkeeper, witnessing the entire thing, was shaking his head to and fro, and tsking.

“The women, they are lunatics, si?”

“Si,” Jonathan agreed fervently. Hand against his cheek. Staring, narrow-eyed, after the rapidly disappearing carriage. An awful suspicion uncoiling in his mind.

“The amore, it is worth it, si?”

“This is where, kind sir, I fear our opinions diverge,” he said darkly.

Baffled and furious, he walked the rest of the way home, allowing the air to cool his face while he rifled through his memories, his assignations, his every move since he’d last seen her two weeks ago, to ascertain what he might have done to deserve assault.

Women were mad capricious creatures; this was the only explanation he could arrive at.

So much for omens. He would tell Violet about it, and then tell her it was all her fault.

T
HE THEME OF
the day appeared to be rude surprises; he arrived home to find his parents unexpectedly in residence at their London town house.

“Mother. Father. What a pleasure.” He tried and failed to inflect that sentence. “I thought you intended to stay in Pennyroyal Green for a time.”

He stood still for a cheek kiss from his mother; his father lowered a newspaper, nodded to him, and raised it up again.

“Violet insisted I would enjoy a bit of shopping in town and said she would be just fine for a day or so without me, so I decided to accompany him. Just for a day or so.”

I’ll
bet
she insisted, Jonathan thought, bleakly amused.

“And your father has a meeting with the Duke of Greyfolk.”

Ah. The Duke of Greyfolk. Jonathan suppressed a dry smile. So his father
had
been listening to him.

He tried to peer through his father’s newspaper to read his devious mind, but his father didn’t so much as twitch.

How unsurprised Jonathan would be if the Duke of Greyfolk was suddenly invited to join the Mercury Club. For men like his father and the duke tended to get what they wanted in any way they possibly could, and they both wanted that Lancaster Mill.

And so at eight o’clock he sat down with his parents to a full dinner of lamb chops and peas. He listened to his mother tell his father about a relative who suffered from a liver complaint. His father actually appeared to be interested. Then again, he’d had years to perfect feigning interest in all manner of things in order to get what he wanted.

The conversation was giving
Jonathan
a liver complaint. He absently thought it would be an excellent idea to marry, if only in order to bear progeny and then torture them with conversations about liver complaints.

He’d learned over the years that a little wine was often the answer to life’s general other complaints, so he took a hearty gulp.

“Your father tells me you intend to wed before the year is out, Jonathan.”

Jonathan choked.

“Smaller sips, dear,” his mother said, as if he was nine years old.

He recovered with some aplomb and gently set down his glass. “I didn’t precisely say that, Mother,” he began carefully.

“Your father isn’t in the habit of mishearing things, Jonathan. I think it’s a wonderfully mature decision and I must say I approve.” She smiled lovingly at him, damn it all. She was so
happy,
and this was so rare. “We’ll fill a nursery with your babies in no time. Surely you noticed the heaps of invitations awaiting in the entry. I put the word about the moment we got in. How fortunate you are that so many beautiful girls have come of age this season.”

And this “putting it about,” as his mother put it, very likely explained Philippa and the insult to his cheek. News of that sort would spread like cholera in London.

Jonathan took this in, nodding, and eyed his fork speculatively. He had two options, as he saw it: He could drive it into his own heart. Or he could hurl it straight into the tiny black heart of his father. Perhaps his aptitude for darts was all in preparation for this moment.

He met Isaiah’s eyes. His father was smiling blandly and indulgently.

No, his heart is too small and shriveled of a target, even for a marksman like me, Jonathan decided blackly.

It
was
true, however, that beautiful girls did abound this season. But beautiful girls were like flowers; he was quite certain he enjoyed them so thoroughly because he wasn’t the one responsible for watering and tending and keeping them alive and happy, and listening to them discuss liver complaints.

There were also going to be a few
other
beautiful girls, some of them the sort who would never be invited to the balls he attended, who could potentially hurl things at him, sob, or orate about how he had allegedly wronged them. He hadn’t a permanent mistress. But a few had . . . auditioned . . . for the role, so to speak. Including Philippa.

God. London, his favorite place, was going to be a veritable gauntlet for the next several weeks.

The walls of the dining room suddenly seemed to be closing in on him.

He
wasn’t
a heartbreaker. Or rather, he never set
out
to do it. He could never understand how women did it so freely, offered hearts without telling a man they were doing it, and then accused a man of stomping on a gift he hadn’t known he’d possessed. Didn’t they know what a
dangerous
business love was? How reckless it was to fall in? Falling in love
alone
was proof of insanity.

His last few bites of lamb chop tasted of sawdust. He swallowed them, finished his wine, and pushed himself away from the table.

“Well, I’m off to fashion a noose,” he said grimly, by way of excusing himself.

“Ha ha!” His mother laughed indulgently.

His father simply smiled generally. Very likely wasn’t listening at all.

Three hours later Jonathan, instead of meeting Argosy at White’s, found himself in front of the Half Moon Theater in Covent Garden.

For if he was a condemned man, quite truthfully, what had he to lose?

Chapter 8

A
ND YET HE STOOD
alone on the street except for a few surly drunks and the occasional rat strolling purposefully by, as if they were laborers off to work. The Half Moon Theater was dark; it had been boarded and shuttered, it appeared, some time ago. Across from him, a noisy pub disgorged and admitted staggering revelers at regular intervals; a listless prostitute asked him if he wanted a go at her. He politely declined.

The moon grew brighter, the night watch called out “Midnight,” and still there was no sign of Thomasina de Ballesteros.

“This way.”

Christ!

One moment she
wasn’t
there, the next she was.

And she’d seen him flinch, because now she was laughing quietly at him.

“Count yourself fortunate I didn’t shoot you.”

“You’ll need to be more alert, Mr. Redmond, if you’re to be of use to me.”

She was draped all over in a dark cloak again, but the husk of her voice was unmistakable. She seemed to have eyes like a cat, too, for Tommy immediately proceeded to swiftly lead him on a mazelike journey through alleys, narrow lanes, once through a park, up a staircase, across the top of one building to another, down a staircase, and he could have sworn they doubled back once to do it all again.

“Is this an elaborate ruse to disorient me in order to divest me of my purse? Because Argosy wasn’t jesting when he said I’d been deprived of my allowance. And, really, is two pounds worth killing over? Because that’s all I have on my person.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it. You’d just shoot me with your pistol.”

“Oh, yes. That.”

She turned left down a narrow street.

“You’re awfully small to be traipsing about London by yourself at this time of night, Miss de Ballesteros.”

“Are you about to get protective?”

“No.”

“Possessive?” A warning edge in her voice.

“God, no. Merely making an observation.”

“I have friends all over London who emerge to do business at . . . varying times of day. They’ll recognize my screams and come to my rescue should I require it.”

They trod along in silence for a few paces.

“You’re trying to decide whether I’m jesting, aren’t you, Mr. Redmond?”

“I unfortunately am quite certain that at least part of your statement was true.”

“Clever as well as pretty!” she said dryly. “This way!”

She made a sharp right turn and then an almost immediate left. Who knew the great arterial streets of London were fed by so very many squalid little tributary alleys and side streets? She did, apparently, because on one street a drunk leaning against the wall called out, “Greetings, Tommy.”

“Greetings, Jasper!”

This exchange was hardly reassuring.

“Is this really necessary?” he groused. “This circuitous route to your lair?”

“Patience. My mystique is everything, Mr. Redmond. And what makes you think it’s circuitous? It may very well simply be the shortest route to my . . . lair.” She liked the word, he could tell.

And she brought them to a stop in front of an unexceptional door in the side of a tall, narrow nondescript building, though most buildings could be described as nondescript in the dark. He suspected a shop occupied the bottom of it, but the windows were shuttered for the night. God only knew where they were, though he was fairly certain she’d strategically led him on an elaborate figure eight of sorts around Covent Garden for the last ten minutes, and they were likely probably only a few feet from where they began.

He listened hard; a drunken chorus swelled up and was abruptly cut off, as if a door had thrown wide on a pub and swung shut again. The song sounded like “The Ballad of Colin Eversea.”

She produced a key, the door creaked open, she beckoned him through, and it slammed what sounded irrevocably shut behind them.

“Is this where I need my pistol?”

“Don’t be silly,” she said absently. A lit lamp was hung on a hook immediately inside the door, obviously awaiting their arrival. She seized the lamp and scampered down a flight of narrow wooden stairs like a squirrel, and he followed, his hands on the walls for balance. Through a short, dark, narrow corridor.

Into a very small, beautifully appointed room, lit by a crackling fire.

He hovered in the doorway, amazed.

The room had glow and warmth, and contained the elegance of a snifter of cognac. A coral velvet tufted settee arched like a stroked cat against one wall; the rug was cream and brown and apricot and floral; the curtains, great heavy columns of coral velvet, were drawn shut. Furniture had obviously been selected with care—he recognized Chippendale and a French screen—and was tastefully and strategically gilded here and polished there. The fire set everything aglow. The back wall, somewhat unusually, was papered in black and white.

Jonathan’s heart gave a lurch. The bloody wall had just . . .
moved
.

He’d begun to entertain the possibility that Philippa had truly done some damage to his brain with her blow when, to his relief and subsequent alarm, he realized it wasn’t a wall.

It was a man. The sort of man one might easily mistake for a wall.

His head, which was just shy of the ceiling, was bald and glossy as porcelain, and embedded with four lines across the forehead, like a musical staff. His shoulders were nearly as broad as the settee, his girth suggested he might have
eaten
a settee, and he sported a shining gold piratical hoop in one ear.