Lady Vice (3 page)

Chapter Four

“There now, my lady,” Lavinia’s maid urged. “The duchess told me to get you cleaned up and looking your formidable best, and I am not about to disappoint Her Grace.”

Lavinia smiled weakly. “Thea wants me prepared for battle.”

“As well she should, if they’re saying you murdered his lordship.” Maggie shook her head as she went to work on the cloth-covered buttons securing Lavinia’s bodice.

Lavinia tried to concentrate on the familiar feel of Maggie’s fingers against her back. When the last button gave way, she lifted her arms and Maggie pulled.

“Lord forgive me, I cannot shed a tear,” Maggie continued. “That man was never right in his mind. He was evil, if you ask me, same as his lordship’s cousin.” Reflected in the mirror atop the dressing table, Maggie’s expression turned dark. “Must we return to that awful house?”

“Likely, yes.” Everything within Lavinia rebelled at the thought of returning.

She tried never to think of that house, or the life she had lived while under its roof. She remembered standing in the half-finished townhouse with Vaile, his cousin Lord Montechurch, and the architect.

…My classical marbles I will place across from each window in my study, where they will best catch the evening light. And here, my desk will stand. I want the perfect place to view the most precious thing in my collection.

Vaile’s eyes had lit on her and Lord Montechurch had smiled, slow and cold.

Lavinia’s breath stumbled. How many times had she performed Vaile’s choreographed ritual within the glass-doored dressing room he had built across from his desk?

No, you lackwit; I said peel off your stockings. Yes, that is better. Unwrap yourself for me.

She’d spent hours a day disrobing for Vaile. By the time Vaile had invited Montechurch to watch as well, Lavinia had learned the utter futility of fight.

Or, so they had thought.

“When I undress, I still feel as if I am being watched.” Lavinia shivered.

Though fashion had once allowed courtiers to innocently assist married ladies with their toilette, Vaile’s forced ritual had been anything but innocent.

“His lordship treated you as if you were one of his statues.” Maggie
tsked
. “I saw plenty in the days before I went to the Magdalene House, but I never heard tell of a gentleman treating his wife’s naked body as a bauble for others to admire.”

Lavinia held Maggie’s gaze in the mirror. They both knew dressing room performances had not been his most depraved demand.

The night of their marriage, Vaile had informed Lavinia he would not be performing his husbandly duties unless appropriately appreciated by an audience. He told her of a procuress who understood his particular tastes. Among other things, the madam brought together those of means
who needed to be watched
with those of means
who liked to watch
.

She had refused to go to the madam’s establishment at first but, night after night, he had reminded her of her vows to him and her duty to provide an heir.

Vaile’s voice rang through her memory.
Which is more important? Your duty to provide an heir to your husband, or the preservation of your modesty?

She had been trained from birth to obey her husband, trained that a wife’s most important duty was to provide an heir. Hogarth’s
A Harlot’s Progress
warned girls of the dangers that waited if they strayed from the moral path. But no one had had told her what to do if the man you vowed to obey asked you to perform outrageous acts and took delight in your pain and distress.

Weary of his constant rage and without anywhere else to turn, she had finally agreed—with the stipulation that she be masked.

The marital transactions, as he termed their visits to the madam’s establishment, lacked any measure of sensuality. Instead, she and Vaile had come together in a display of protest on her part and unmitigated ownership on his—much to the delight of the men peering at them through peepholes in the walls.

Duty
. She hated the word.

“Ah, Maggie.” She rubbed her stomach. “I prayed I would conceive so I could put an end to the madness. I am grateful, now, my prayers were never answered.”

“Come,” Maggie urged. “He cannot hurt you any longer. Let me loosen your stays.”

Lavinia nodded stiffly, and Maggie resumed. She exhaled as her stays fell away. Maggie released the ties that secured her petticoats and the heavy, wet fabric dropped to the floor. She stepped out of the circle of lace and linen.

“If I have a say, the house will be emptied and sold as soon as possible. Not that I wish to allow strangers to parade through the place.” She could not help another shiver, and not just because she was clad only in her shift. “Surely anyone who sees the glass door and my dressing room will guess how Vaile made me live.”

Maggie held up a dressing gown. “Truth is not as plain as we think.”

“I hope you are right.” Lavinia slipped her arms inside the comforting warmth and tied the garment at her collar. She swiveled and touched Maggie’s cheek. “I thank you for your loyalty.”

Maggie flushed and turned away.

Maggie’s years as a prostitute had hardened the maid. Three years out of the Magdalene House and several months more off the streets, and a kind word still caused her embarrassment.

Lavinia understood. When Max had offered to take her away she had frozen inside, suddenly certain she was unworthy of his sacrifice. His kindness had only served to make the cold pain of her shame more acute.

“Shall I ask Lady Sophia’s housekeeper to prepare dye for mourning clothes?” Maggie asked.

Lavinia’s heart stopped. She hadn’t considered a period of mourning. She understood what people would expect…the downcast eyes, the drawn expression.

Assuming her role in the theater of grief was not a worry. She was a competent actress—first she had acted the devoted wife, then the vicious harpy. Neither role had revealed what lay beneath. Both had sharpened her skills.

But mourning, and whatever inquiry into Vaile’s death that would accompany the nightmare, would require she withdraw from public interaction and would temporarily prevent her from hosting the Furies’ gambling salons—and the salons were her only source of coin.

Though the law made a husband responsible for his wife’s debts, neither Lavinia nor the duchess had wanted to sue in chancery for an allowance, and she, Sophia, and Thea had come up with the idea of exclusive gambling salons with games and wagers and betting books benefitting the hostesses.

If she could not host the salons with Thea and Sophia, how would she collect gold? If she could not collect gold, how would she continue to pay Vaile’s procuress to keep her silence?

Soon after Lavinia had left Vaile, the Madam, known on the streets as Iphigenia, had made her terms clear: gold for silence. With the coroner’s court about to convene, Lavinia needed, now more than ever, to keep her secrets. And she was already a payment behind, because last evening the Madam had not appeared at their usual meeting place.

Lavinia rubbed her forehead.

“My lady?”

She blinked. What had Maggie asked? Dye for mourning.

“Collect the clothes Vaile favored.”—designed to be stripped off the wearer on demand—“Dye those, not the ones I purchased this year.”

“Very well.” Maggie lifted Lavinia’s bodice and squinted.

“I ruined it.”

“No, I think not. A nice bit of embroidery will fix this right up.” Maggie turned with a knowing expression. “You have ruined less than you believe.”

Lavinia sank onto her dressing table chair. Maggie lied. She was ruined in body and soul. Soon the details of her shame would be fed to a ravenous public anxious to judge and condemn.

Maggie began gathering the clothes. “I will take these down to the press room while you rest a spell. Should I brush out the man in the library’s coat as well?”

Lavinia’s throat dried.
Max.

“Yes,” she replied. “Thank you.”

She closed her eyes. The myth of the untouchable Lady Vice had drawn singularly aggressive male attention this past year, yet each man’s flirtations had left her unmoved.
His
kiss, however, had been heavenly. When they kissed, she had become young again.

She grimaced. As if she could ever be young again. Young and full of hope for a future that would never come. Her future had never looked bleaker. Pain hunched her shoulders, and she bit her lower lip. She had been selfish and foolish to allow him to stay.

She reached for her quill, then changed her mind. Because Max had risked his reputation to prepare her for the worst, he deserved better than to be dismissed in a hastily written note.

“Maggie, will you send the man in the library to me by way of the servants’ stair?”

“I will.”

As Maggie left, Lavinia wandered to her window. Across the courtyard garden, light emanated from Sophia’s study window. Lavinia frowned with concern. Lately, the end-of-the-evening company Sophia kept with Lord Randolph had been lengthening with every salon, even as their mysterious ten-game-wager approached its much-speculated-upon finish.

By all appearances, Randolph was a dissolute earl whose interest lay more in women and gambling than in the management of his estate and the goings on in the House of Lords.

Sophia insisted she had no interest in a man who was a rogue through and through, but Lavinia was certain Randolph had designs on Sophia, just as she was certain there was more to Randolph than met the eye.

Lavinia pulled the curtain closed.

For tonight, she would have to trust Sophia’s judgment and assume Sophia would not yield to Randolph’s pursuit. No lady in England was able to hold her own with wit and strength like Sophia.

“Lavinia?” Max called through the doorway.

“Do come in.” Was that her voice—high, wavering and uncertain?

Max leaned against the door frame, his expression unreadable.

The fire in the grate and the taper on her dressing table dimly lit the doorway, but Max’s presence dominated, even in shadow. His broad shoulders and self-possessed air made him appear as if he was formed to command an estate.

Or a woman’s heart.

The Maximilian of her memory ceased to exist next to the real man. The former was a simple penny-lute tune. In the flesh, Max was the King’s Theater orchestra playing Haydn.

“You sent for me?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Strange. Even across the room, he quickened flesh she had thought hardened and dead. Her body ripened with terrifying yearning.

“What is it?” he asked.

Maybe she needn’t send him away. Dare she hope that Max, who valued justice above all else, could learn the truth and understand?

“Lavinia.” His forehead wrinkled with earnestness. “If you are worried, know this: you are not alone.”

He stepped inside the chamber. He broke her heart all over again by smoothing her hair and placing a chaste kiss on her forehead. She folded his fingers into her palm and held on to his warmth in urgent silence.

Love, peace, and refuge.

Coldness fused her splintering chest.

All balderdash.

“You left me once before,” she said.

He hummed a low, dangerous growl. “What did Vaile do to you? How did he fill you with scorn and bitterness?” Within his eyes, fury hissed like doused-fire smoke. “Did he beat you?”

A simple yes would earn his understanding and sympathy, and she would never need to reveal the truth.

She blinked, and her eyelashes stubbornly stuck together. No! She had never given Vaile the pleasure of her tears. She would not cry now.

“He did, didn’t he?” He lifted her from the chair and gathered her into a fiercely protective embrace. Strangely, she did not bristle. Her cheek flattened against the swell of his chest and denial choked in her throat. She staunched her tears with a stinging inhale.

“No, Max. Vaile did not beat me.”
…Not the way you mean.
He’d belittled her and isolated her and raged every day against her stupidity, sloth, and common nature but, outside the
marital transaction,
he’d never laid a hand on her.

“Then what?” He released her, frowning.

She examined him in the dim light. Perhaps, if he had known in his heart that Vaile had used trickery to trap her in marriage, she could trust him to understand the darker details.

“My separation from Vaile,” she said, “was the last in a long line of humiliations, beginning with a forced marriage.”

He flinched with surprise, and her stomach lurched like a toppling cart.

“You did not marry him willingly?”

In his tone she heard a thousand nights of agony, nights full of self-recrimination, nights he spent believing himself a fool for having given her his love.

“We married,” she said, “after he had the means to shatter my reputation.”

“I thought…” he began.

“You thought me fickle,” she finished.

Just as she suspected, this man who had always held her heart never once doubted she had betrayed him by choice. Max would never see the ocean of color between black and white. Max, with his proud honor and his unimpeachable record, could only see her as a sullied, weak, and ruined woman.

She pulled away and walked back to the window. She opened the curtain, craving light. He gripped her shoulders and forced her to face him. The mottled morning sunlight spilled over his face in a haphazard cascade. A muscle in his jaw flinched and the Max she had loved disappeared under the overbearing shadow of a man she did not know.

“How could I have known you did not wish to marry Vaile?”

“You could have trusted me.” She jerked away.

“You cannot blame me for believing you chose a peer over a lowly—”

“Stop,” Lavinia said firmly, “right there.”

“Tell me what happened,” he urged, strained.

Her gaze settled on the harsh angles of his cheeks. “After you left, Mother insisted a season would lift my spirits, not truly understanding the
ton
would treat the daughter of a brewer differently than she’d been treated in her own season. Imagine the types of invitations that came. Every gathering was full of gentlemen hungry for money. Gentlemen not expecting to be denied by a slip of a thing they considered far beneath their notice. I did as much as I could to be unappealing without dishonoring my mother and her family. I chose unflattering clothes. I affected shyness. I spoke only of my hope for your return.”