Scarlet Devices (8 page)

In other respects, unfortunately—

“Don't soak in that bath for too long. Remember we have an early start in the morning, and you need a good night's sleep.”

She fingered her key, resisting the urge to poke him with it. “Thank you for the advice. I'll take it under the same consideration I take all your advice.”

“Eliza . . . I'm sorry about your clothes being ruined and for any embarrassment you suffered, but I'm not sorry you had to leave before Cantlebury finished his story.”

“The story's that bad, really?” She fitted the key in the lock, then put her back to the door and faced him. “What was the danger? That I would expire from girlish chagrin on the spot? Perhaps the shock of such lurid words would have caused my maiden ears to implode. Might not be so bad, of course. I could get those clever implants Charlotte has, become impervious to motion sickness and end up with better hearing than anyone. There is always a silver lining. And I would owe it all to Cantlebury and his wicked tale of the nuns and the donkey.”

“Pony. It's always a pony.”

Shrugging her shoulders reminded her that she still had his jacket, but when she moved to take it off and return it Matthew pressed his fingertips to her shoulders to prevent her removing the garment the rest of the way. As a result it hung open, hiding nothing, framing the deep red stain. With his hands there, she couldn't pull it closed again either.

“Keep it. It's as doomed as your blouse and—and other things, anyway.”

His words hardly registered. When he touched her, intervening fabric notwithstanding, all her attention had flown to those points of contact, and she'd lost her train of thought completely. Looking up to see if Matthew had noticed, she realized he was standing far too close for propriety. There in the corridor, where anyone might see.

She didn't care.

Matthew didn't meet her gaze. His stare was locked just below the level of his hands, as though the beam of his notice been caught in a snare there. Lips slightly parted, eyes dark and shadowed behind half-lowered lids. Eliza knew she was breathing too fast, that her heart was thumping at an alarming pace beneath her ruined shirt. Matthew seemed to have stopped breathing entirely.

She saw—felt—his every motion as though time had expanded, slowed down to let her capture each impression fully. His fingertips flexed once against her shoulders, then his palms flattened slowly against her, his thumbs grazing into the hollows over her clavicles. When he pressed gently, securing her against the door, Eliza's eyes fluttered shut and she forgot everything else in the world but his touch and the eager response of her nerve endings.

Even though she knew what came next, the brush of his lips over hers was startling. She gasped into his mouth, light-headed with want for things she couldn't articulate. Things she hadn't expected to want from Matthew Pence, but her body obviously felt otherwise. She wasn't inclined to argue with it at the moment.

His breath was hot, and tinted with port wine. When he pulled away, her mouth felt cold.

Opening her eyes, she watched as Matthew lifted his hands away, his expression as wide and astonished as a rabbit faced with the headlight of an oncoming steam carriage. For a moment he stood frozen, hands raised like a robbery victim, then he reached down beside her and turned the knob, opening the door before returning the key to her. He offered it dangling by two fingers, as though he were frightened to touch it, and dropped it into her palm when she reached to take it from him.

After a long moment they both drew breath at the same time, as if about to speak over one another. Eliza had not a coherent word in her head though, not one she could pin down long enough to utter. Matthew must have felt the same, because he remained as silent as she.

Finally, he nodded his head and strode away down the hall, never having said a word.

Eliza backed into her room and leaned against the door, closing herself in and pressing her cheek against the cool wood.

The first day of the rally was done, and what a long, strange day it had been.

I
N THE MORNING
, the dauntless ladies of the gold poppy lapel pins were assembled in force outside the Meridian Grand Hotel. Jostling for space with the press and the rest of the spectators, they wielded their elbows and bold placards with equal vigor.

“But who
are
they?” Eliza asked, sneaking peeks at the mob from the relative safety of the hotel dining room. She had pulled her chair out of place and was currently hidden from street view by one of the heavy red velvet curtains.

She was asking her table mates, the three other female drivers, but it was the waiter who answered as he poured Madame Barsteau a fresh cup of poisonously strong coffee.

“The ones with the signs and the flower pins, miss? They're the El Dorado Foundation Ladies' Society for Temperance and Moral Fortitude.” The long name tripped off his tongue with the ease of long familiarity, but his expression suggested his acquaintance with the organization was not a pleasant one.

“I see.”

“Do they really call themselves that?” asked Lavinia Speck, the one British woman in the race. She was a sweet-faced lady of thirty or so, but her shy smile concealed a sharp wit Eliza had already come to appreciate. Along with Madame Barsteau and Cecily Davis, the other Dominion woman, she had undertaken to debrief the newest member of their ranks on how best to handle the so-called “gentlemen” she would encounter if she pursued a racing career.

“They do, miss,” the waiter confirmed. “And they mean every word of it.”

“How unwieldy. There isn't even an acronym.”

“The temperance part I understand,” Eliza noted with a frown, “but what does the moral fortitude part refer to, exactly?”

Glancing about to make sure the maître d' didn't catch him lingering, the young man leaned closer, the gleam of gossip brightening his eyes. “It's about opium dens, miss. And human trafficking of a sort I can't discuss with ladies.”

“I'm no lady,” Madame Barsteau asserted. “You can tell me.”

“If you insist, ma'am. The Foundation exists to fight the growing and nefarious presence of the illegal opium trade that's apparently sweeping east from the California coast. Dens of vice and iniquity, mysterious oriental rituals . . .” His eyes flicked to Eliza's face, and he bit his lip. “Begging your pardon, miss.”

“Not necessary, I assure you. My ancestor didn't keep to the old ways.” That was an understatement, but she hoped the boy would continue.

“The essence of it is that they think there's an opium house on every corner, and that one dose will render any poor fool an addict, doomed to fall into a spiral of sin. Eventually the opium eater will lose all touch with family, sell his body and soul for the next dose, and the next thing you know, he's gone west forever. Or, worse still,
she
has. They save their very finest moments of umbrage for ladies who demonstrate suspect morals, because we all know what happens when
they
fall into spirals of sin. It's not indentured service labor camps they wind up in, evidently.”

“Good heavens.” Miss Speck dabbed her mouth with her napkin, every inch the proper spinster, but Eliza could see the corner of her mouth and the smirk she was trying to hide. “What active imaginations those women must have.”

Miss Davis, a native of the California Dominion herself, was less subtle. “What a load of claptrap. Haven't they got better things to do with their time?”

“Who is it?” Madame Barsteau asked, her piercing gaze never leaving the young man. “The one you know in this society? I can tell by the way you speak, someone close to you must be involved.”

“My mother. My two aunts. And lately my sister, although I don't think it will take with her.”

“You have my sympathy.”

“Thank you, ma'am.”

For Eliza, the boy's explanation had raised as many questions as it answered. “But are there actually any opium dens here? It seems so unlikely.”

“Not that I know of,” he admitted. “We've had a few folks go west, though. You don't need an opium house to fall into a life of vice and vanish forever.”

“I suppose not. Liquor alone can kill, and I'm sure there are other narcotics that can besides opium.”

“Oh, they don't die,” he said firmly. “They go west.”

“A euphemism—”

“No. Sometimes they even leave a note, explaining. Like I said, they sell themselves off. Or somebody takes them in lieu of payment, but it's all the same outcome.”

“William!”

The sharp voice of the maître d' jolted the lad into swift action, and he scraped a crumb from the table and cleared an empty bread plate as if by reflex before he disappeared back into the kitchen.

In the silence that followed his departure, Eliza heard the muffled chanting from the street beyond the windows. Not the words but the rhythm, primal and hostile. She had thought them silly, but they were in deadly earnest. The incident on the bridge in Harrisburg took on a more sinister cast. To them, this was no euphemism, no theory. As far as they were concerned, people's lives were at stake. And Eliza, with her unconventional life choices and that suspicious hint of the orient in her eyes, must seem like the embodiment of the dangers they feared. The flashy red car was just fuel for the flame.

Charlotte's words came back to her, the challenge to see the world outside the privileged life she'd been born into. Now she began to see how many layers there were to that challenge. The provincial attitudes, so unlike those in the wealthier enclaves of the New York Dominion. The casual racism she had heard about but so rarely encountered near home, where so many Chinese merchants had established themselves and fully embraced Western ways. She'd been spoiled enough to think that spending four years in free-thinking Poughkeepsie was a horizon-broadening experience. But Meridian might as well be another world. Everything about Eliza must seem utterly alien and dissipated to these women.

She swirled the last of her tea in its bone china cup, studying the leaves, broody and unsettled. Charlotte had also discussed pleasure in that conversation. Another horizon she might broaden, though Eliza didn't think Charlotte meant her to combine that experience with the rally in quite such an explicit way.

Even after a night of sleep, a large breakfast and two cups of tea, Eliza could still feel the brush of Matthew's lips against hers. The mere memory sent a thrill through her, a sensuous thread of possibility that seemed to link all her most sensitive zones into one large, needy bundle. She knew exactly where he sat in the room—two tables behind her and to her right—and had felt his gaze on the back of her head throughout her meal. It was as if she'd become attuned to him, a compass to his lodestar, or perhaps the other kind of compass, bound to turn as he did. Then she realized she was borrowing imagery from John Donne, and rolled her eyes at her own mawkishness.

She had things to do, important things like running the gauntlet of reporters and angry temperance ladies, and ensuring her car hadn't been tampered with in the night. Taking an early lead. Establishing a pace the others couldn't hope to match. Remembering to check the only compass that mattered, the one in her car that would keep her heading in the right direction: toward St. Louis and the Victoria Dominion.

This was not a time for poetry. This was a time for action.

 • • • 

B
Y THE TIME
his breakfast was served, Matthew had nearly convinced himself it was all the fault of the port. Until, that is, Eliza strode into the room. She ignored him completely, too much so to be accidental. It was a very cold shoulder she showed him as she took a seat at another table, with her slender back to him. From the lively babble, she took eager part in conversing with the other ladies and seemed completely unaltered by the incident of the previous evening.

Matthew was altered. When he saw her again he resigned himself to it, because his reaction was unequivocal. His heart beat faster, his palms dampened and he
yearned
, damn it all. And as if those feelings weren't enough to manage, he also had to contend with the resentment, the sense of injustice, the sheer improbability of his situation.

He'd made it all the way through Oxford, through his whirlwind apprenticeship and journeyman tenure at Hardison House, fended off several seasons worth of eligible young ladies at balls his mother had forced him to attend, and come through it all unscathed. Heart intact, unencumbered. All that, only to succumb when he least expected it, from a quarter he had never bothered to guard because it was simply not a danger he could have foreseen or even imagined. Never in a million years.

Falling in love with Eliza Hardison. He wasn't sure when it had happened, but now that he'd admitted it to himself he felt like a fool for his previous willful blindness. Eliza, obviously. Eliza,
of course
. A hundred love poems danced through his brain, attempting to apply themselves despite his efforts to resist.

Eliza, the last woman on earth he needed to be chasing after, the last woman on earth who would want to be chased by him.
Or . . .

He pushed the image down as soon as it popped up, but there it was, lurking in the back of his mind where the love poems frolicked. His moment of madness last night. That kiss, her face, his hands engulfing her shoulders, the way he'd seen and felt her breathing start to race, and that telltale
gasp
she'd let out.

It hit him hard, that one noise, caught and held on something in his soul. Or somewhere less noble, yet still undeniable.

Today she wore a blatantly unwise white walking suit, trimmed in black lace. The road dust would destroy it within minutes, but it looked marvelous at the moment. The coat, modeled in a hunting style, nipped in at her waist before falling in nearly a straight line from her hips to the floor, showing her figure to perfection from the back. But the front . . . might well give Matthew a heart attack. Because the skirt was a sham, the dress more a frock coat than anything else. It split at the waist, allowing her more freedom of movement and showing her long, black-clad legs from hip to toe.

Breeches were still on the cutting edge of fashion on the east coast, thanks in no small part to Charlotte's trend-setting efforts. Matthew had seen them on women, of course. They were all the rage in England and Europa. But he hadn't expected them here, in rural Meridian, on Eliza. And fitting like a glove.

She might as well wave a red flag in front of the bull that was the ladies' temperance group. He'd seen them picketing the hotel, recognized them by their signs and lapel pins, and finally inquired about them. The concierge, a circumspect gentleman who had clearly seen everything in his long tenure at the Grand Hotel, was not a fan of the El Dorado Foundation Ladies' Society for Temperance and Moral Fortitude. His daughter, he informed Matthew, had started taking him to task for keeping medicinal brandy in his home shortly after she'd joined the Temperance Society.

“As if her mother and I might fall into a moral decline from taking an occasional fortifying nip,” he said in disgust. “At our age.”

He hadn't been able to answer Matthew's other question. He had no idea what the golden poppy lapel pins signified. But he agreed with Matthew that they seemed an odd choice, given that opium was a primary focus of the Temperance Society's ire, and opium came from poppies.

“They might as well wear bunches of grapes,” the concierge grumbled, before putting his professional face back on to handle the next guest to approach his desk.

When Matthew overheard the young waiter at breakfast discussing the Temperance Society with the ladies' table, he pricked up his ears and took the next chance to flag the young man down.

“Mum's told me,” the waiter said of the pins, “but it didn't make much sense. Something to do with restoring the natural order of things and honoring God's creations, or some such. Mostly I think they wear them because a bundle of them come with the charter kit for the local chapters. My aunt has a jar of them just waiting for new members. She's the chapter president. I think the poppy is the foundation's symbol.”

“The El Dorado Foundation?”

“I suppose so, yes.”

The waiter knew nothing more about the foundation itself, however, leaving Matthew little more edified than before. The poppy motif still tickled something in his brain, though, and he suspected it wouldn't leave him alone until he'd figured out why.
Vexing.

He didn't need more distractions. Getting Eliza through the mob would take all his attention, he thought. But to his surprise, when he reached the hotel lobby where the rally contestants were supervising the transfer of their luggage back to the vehicle holding area, Eliza had already secured protection. Parnell and Lazaris flanked her, looking full of ego and bravado as they proceeded with her out the hotel door and down the steps.