Silk Is For Seduction (35 page)

Marcelline had given up trying to create something beautiful. She wasn’t in the mood. She looked in on the seamstresses, then she went upstairs and looked in on Lucie, who was reading to Susannah from one of the books Clevedon had bought.

After the visit to the nursery, Marcelline went into their sitting room and poured herself a glass of brandy.

She’d taken only a few sips before her sisters returned, looking windblown and sounding a little out of breath, but otherwise undamaged.

They poured brandy, too, and reported.

“It was delicious,” Sophy said. “They must practice at the boxing salons, because they’re very good.”

“It didn’t look like practice to me,” Leone said. “It looked like they were trying to kill each other.”

“It was wonderfully ferocious,” Sophy said. “Their hats were off, and their coats, too, and they were trampling their neckcloths. Their hair was wild and they had blood on their clothes.” She fanned herself with her hand. “I vow, it was enough to make a girl swoon.”

“It put me in mind of the Roman mobs at the Coliseum,” Leonie said. “Half of White’s must have been there—all those fine gentlemen, and all of them shouting and betting on the outcome and egging them on.”

“Leonie’s right,” Sophy said. “It did look to be getting out of hand, and I was thinking we ought to find a safer place to watch from. But then the Earl of Hargate came out of St. James’s Palace with some other men.”

“Straight through the crowd of men he came, pushing them out of his way—and he must be sixty if he’s a day,” Leonie said.

“But he carries himself like Zeus,” Sophy said. “And the men gave way, and he ordered his grace and his lordship to stop making damned fools of themselves.”

“They weren’t listening,” Leonie said.

“It was the bloodlust,” Sophy said. “They were like wolves.”

“None of the other men had dared to try to break it up,” Leonie said.

“But Lord Hargate waded right into the fight,” Sophy said. “And he got in the way of Longmore’s fist. But the earl dodged the blow—oh, Marcelline, I wish you’d seen it—and then he grabbed Longmore’s arm and pulled him away from Clevedon. And one of the gentleman with him—it had to be one of his sons—the same features, build, and coloring. Whichever one it was, he took hold of Clevedon.”

“And then the earl and his son dragged them away.”

“And one of the other gentlemen was threatening to read the Riot Act, and so we came away.” Sophy drank her brandy and poured some more.

“I’m sure we needn’t wonder what it was about,” Marcelline said. “Longmore avenging his sister’s honor, or some such.”

“Why should he need to?” Sophy said. “Everyone thought Lady Clara avenged her own honor very well. Anything Longmore did would be anticlimactic, don’t you think?”

“Then what provoked fisticuffs in St. James’s Street?” Leonie said.

“Don’t be thick,” Sophy said. “It’s not as though men need a sane reason. They were both in a bad mood. One of them picked a fight. And I’ll wager anything that now it’s over, they’ll be getting drunk together.”

“Why was Longmore in a bad mood, Sophy?” Marcelline said. “You said he’d been here, after Clevedon left.”

“He came to plague me about the ball and call me a traitor for spying for Tom Foxe on his sister and friend. I pretended not to know what he was talking about. Oh, Lord.” Her pretty countenance turned repentant. “Oh, Marcelline, what horrid sisters we are. We hear of a fight, and off we go, little bloodthirsty cats, and there you are, your heart breaking—”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Marcelline said. “Save the drama for the newspapers.”

“But what happened, dearest?” Sophy set down her glass and knelt by Marcelline and took her hand. “What did Clevedon say and what did you say—and why are you pretending your heart isn’t broken?”

Clevedon House

Sunday 10 May, three o’clock in the morning

T
he house was dark, everyone abed but one. In the library, a single candle flickered over a solitary figure in a dressing gown whose pen scratched rapidly across the paper.

The Duke of Clevedon had done his best to beat Longmore to a bloody pulp. Afterward they’d emptied one bottle after another. Yet he’d come home all too sober. It seemed there wasn’t enough drink in all the world to dull the ache in his heart or quiet his conscience and let him sleep.

Nothing to be done about the heartache but endure.

His conscience was another matter.

It drove him to the library. Then, even before he took up his pen to write to Clara, he knew how it must begin:

Be not alarmed, madam, on receiving this letter, by the apprehension of its containing any repetition of those sentiments, or renewal of those offers, which were last night so disgusting to you.

It was the start of Mr. Darcy’s letter to Elizabeth Bennett in
Pride and Prejudice
, Clara’s favorite novel. He could easily imagine her reluctant smile when she read it. He continued in his own words:

I was wrong to make an offer, and you were right in all you said, but you said not half enough. Our listeners should have heard the thousand ways I’ve taken you for granted and tried your good nature and the ways I’ve thought only of myself and never of you. You’ve been true to me for all the time I’ve known you, and for all that time I, too, have been true only to me. When you were grieving for the grandmother I knew you dearly loved, I abandoned you to jaunt about the Continent. I expected you to wait for me, and you did. How, then, did I return your patience and loyalty? I was neglectful, insensitive, and false.

He wrote on, of the many ways he’d wronged her. She’d brought joy and light into his life when he was a lonely, heartbroken boy. Her letters had brightened his days. She was dear to him, and always would be, but they were friends and no more. Surely he’d known in his heart this wasn’t enough for marriage, but it was the easy way and he took it. He’d been false to her and false to himself, because he’d been a coward, afraid to risk his heart.

He acknowledged all his thoughtless and unkind acts, and concluded:

I’m sorry, my dear, so deeply sorry. I hope in time you’ll forgive me—though I can’t at the moment suggest a reason to do so. With all my heart I wish you the happiness I ought to have been able to give you and a hundred times more.

He wrote his usual affectionate closing, and signed with his initial, as he always did.

He folded up the letter, addressed it, and left it in the tray for the servant to take out with the morning mail.

Then, only the heartache remained.

Chapter Seventeen

Experience, the mother of true wisdom, has long since convinced me, that real beauty is best discerned by real judges; and the addresses of a sensible lover imply the best compliment to a woman of understanding.

La Belle Assemblée,

or Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine,

Advertisements for June 1807

Early afternoon, Sunday 10 May

T
he Duke of Clevedon blinked at the excessively bright light. Saunders, the sadist, stood looking down at him. He’d opened the curtains, and the sun was as bright as lightning bolts. When Clevedon moved his head, thunder cracked, right against his skull.

“I’m so sorry to disturb you, your grace.”

“No, you’re not,” Clevedon croaked.

“Mr. Halliday was most insistent,” Saunders said. “He said you would wish to be wakened. Mrs. Noirot is here.”

Clevedon sat up abruptly. His brain thumped painfully against something hard and sharp. The interior of his skull had grown thorns. “Lucie,” he said. “Is she ill? Lost? Damn, I told her that child needed . . .” The sentence trailed off as his drink-poisoned brain caught up with his tongue.

“Mrs. Noirot said we were to assure your grace that the Princess Erroll of Albania is well and safely at home doing sums with her aunt. Mr. Halliday has taken the liberty of asking Mrs. Noirot to wait in the library. Being aware that you would need time to dress, he saw to it that refreshment was brought to her. I have brought your coffee, sir.”

Now Clevedon’s heart was pounding, too, along with his brain, but not at the same tempo.

He did not leap from his bed, but he got out more quickly than was altogether comfortable for a man in his condition. He hastily swallowed the coffee. He washed and dressed in record time, though it seemed an age to him, even though he decided not to bother with the nicety of shaving.

A glance in the mirror told him shaving wouldn’t do much to improve his appearance. He looked like an animated corpse. He tied his neckcloth in a haphazard knot, shrugged into his coat, and hurried out of the room, still buttoning it.

W
hen he came in, smoothing his neckcloth like a nervous schoolboy called on to recite from the
Iliad,
he found Noirot bent over the library table
.

She was perfect, as usual, in one of her more dashing creations, a heavy white silk embroidered all over with red and yellow flowers. The double-layered short cape, its edges gored and trimmed in black lace, was made of the same material. It extended out over her shoulders and over the big sleeves of her dress. Round her neck she’d tied a black lace something or other. Her hat sat well back on her head, so that its brim framed her face, and that inner brim was adorned with lace and ribbons. More ribbon and lace trimmed the back, where a tall plume of feathers sprouted.

He, clearly, did not make nearly as pretty a picture. At his entrance she looked up, and her hand went to her bosom. “Oh, no,” she said. Then she collected herself and said, in cooler tones, “I heard about the fight.”

“It’s not as bad as all that,” he said, though he knew it was. “I know how to dodge a blow to the face. You ought to see Longmore. At any rate, this is the way I always look after an excessively convivial night with a man who tried to kill me. Why are you here?”

He was careful to keep any hope from his face as well as his voice. It was harder to keep it from his heart. He didn’t want to let himself hope she’d changed her mind. He was fully awake and sober now and wishing he were drunk again.

He could truly understand at last, not only in his mind but in his gut as well, why his father had crawled into a bottle. Drink dulled the pain. Physical pain dulled it, too. While fighting with Longmore he’d felt nothing. Now he remembered every word he’d said to her, the way he’d opened his heart, concealing nothing. It hadn’t been enough.
He
wasn’t enough.

She gestured at the table. “I was looking at the magazines,” she said. “I’m unscrupulous. I looked at your notes, too. But I can’t read your writing. You said you had ideas. About my business.”

“Is that why you’ve come?” he said tightly. “For the ideas for your shop—the ideas to make you the greatest modiste in the world.”

“I
am
the greatest modiste in the world,” she said.

Dear God how he loved her! Her self-confidence, her unscrupulousness, her determination, her strength, her genius. Her passion.

He allowed himself a smile, and hoped it didn’t look too sickeningly infatuated. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “How could I forget? You
are
the greatest modiste in the world.”

“But I’m someone else as well,” she said.

She moved away from the table and walked to the window and looked out into the garden.

He waited. Had he any choice?

“I was tired yesterday,” she said, still looking out. “Very tired. It was a shockingly busy day, and we were run off our feet, and I was in a state, trying not to fall apart.” She turned away from the window and met his gaze. “I was trying so hard that I was unkind and unfair to you.”

“On the contrary, you declined my offer quite gently,” he said. “You told me I was kind and generous.” He couldn’t altogether keep the bitterness from his voice. It was the same as telling a man,
We can still be
friends
. He couldn’t be her friend. That wasn’t enough. He understood now, not merely in his mind but with every cell of his being, why Clara had told him it wasn’t enough.

“You were kind and generous enough to deserve the truth,” she said. “About me.”

Then he remembered the stray thought he’d had after he’d seen Lucie for the first time. “Damn it to hell, Noirot, you’re already married. I thought of that, but I forgot. That is, Lucie had to have a father. But he wasn’t in view. You were on your own.”

“He’s dead.”

Relief made him dizzy. He moved to stand at the chimneypiece. He pretended to lean casually against it. His hands were shaking. Again. He was in a very bad way.

“Your grace, you look very ill,” she said. “Please sit down.”

“No, I’m well.”

“No, sit, please, I beg you. I’m a wretched mass of nerves as it is. Waiting for you to swoon isn’t making this easier.”

“I never swoon!” he said indignantly. But he took his wreck of a body to the sofa and sat.

She walked back to the library table and took up a cup from the tray resting there. She brought it to him. “It’s gone cold,” she said, “but you need it.”

He took it from her and drank. It was cold, but it helped.

She sat in the nearest chair. A few, very few feet of carpet lay between them. All the world lay between them.

She folded her hands in her lap. “My husband’s name was Charles Noirot. He was a distant cousin. He died in France in the cholera epidemic a few years ago. Most of my relatives died then. Lucie fell gravely ill.”

Her husband dead. Her relatives dead. Her child on the brink of death.

He tried to imagine what that had been like and his imagination failed. He and Longmore had been on the Continent when the cholera struck. They’d survived, and that, as far as he could make out, had been a miracle. Most victims died within hours.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I had no idea.”

“Why should you?” she said. “The point of all this is my family, and who I am.”

“Then your name really is Noirot,” he said. “I’d wondered if it was simply a Frenchified name you three had adopted for the shop.”

Her smile was taut. “That was the name my paternal grandfather adopted when he fled France during the Revolution. He got his wife and children out, and some aunts and cousins. Others of his family were not so lucky. His older brother, the Comte de Rivenoir, was caught trying to escape Paris. After he and his family went to the guillotine, my grandfather inherited the title. He saw the folly of trying to make use of it. His family, the Robillon family, had a bad name in France. You know the character, the Vicomte de Valmont, in the book by Laclos,
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
?”

He nodded. It was one of a number of books Lord Warford had declared unfit for decent people to read. Naturally, when they were boys, Longmore had got hold of a copy and he and Clevedon had read it.

“The Robillon men were that sort of French aristocrat,” she said. “Libertines and gamblers who used people like pawns or toys. They weren’t popular at that time, and they’re still not remembered affectionately in France. Since he wanted to be able to move about freely, Grandfather took a name as common as dirt. Noirot. Or, in English, Black. He and his offspring used one or the other name, depending on the seduction or swindle or ruse in hand at the moment.”

He was leaning forward now, listening intently. Pieces were falling into place: the way she spoke, her smooth French and her aristocratic accent . . . but she’d told him she was English. Well, then, she’d lied about that, too.

“I knew you weren’t quite what you appeared to be,” he said. “My servants took you for quality, and servants are rarely taken in.”

“Oh, we can take in anybody,” she said. “We’re born that way. The family never forgot they were aristocrats. They never gave up their extravagant ways. They were expert seducers, and they used the skill to find wealthy spouses. Being more romantic and less practical than their Continental counterparts, the men had great luck with highborn Englishwomen.”

“That must hold true for English
men
as well,” he said.

Her dark gaze met his. “It does. But I never set out to get a spouse. I’ve lied and cheated—you don’t know the half of it—but it was all for the purpose I explained early in our acquaintance.”

“I know you cheat at cards,” he said.

“I didn’t cheat during our last game of Vingt et Un,” she said. “I merely played as though my life depended on it. People in my family often find themselves in that position: playing a game on which their life depends. But cheating at cards is nothing. I forged names on our passports to get out of France quickly. My family often finds it necessary to leave a country suddenly. My sisters and I were taught the skill, and we practiced diligently, because we never knew when we’d need it. We were well educated in the normal ways as well. We had lessons in deportment as well as mathematics and geography. Whatever else we Noirots were—and it wasn’t pretty—we were aristocrats, and that was our most valuable commodity. To speak and carry ourselves as ladies and gentlemen do—you can imagine the fears it allays, the doors it opens.”

“I can see that it would be much easier to seduce an aristocratic English girl if you don’t sound like a clerk from the City or a linen draper,” he said. “But you married a cousin. You have a shop. You didn’t follow the same path.”

She got up abruptly from her chair and moved away in a rustle of petticoats. He rose, too, unsteadily, and he couldn’t tell whether that was the aftereffects of fighting and drinking or the hope warring with the certainty he’d lost her.

She walked to the library table and took up his notes. “Your handwriting is deplorable,” she said. She put them down and, turning back to him, said, “I haven’t told you about my mother.”

“An English aristocrat, yes? Or something else?”

She gave a short laugh. “Both.”

She returned to her chair, and he sat, too. His heart thudded. Something was coming, and it wasn’t good. He was sure of that. He was leaning forward, waiting. He was wanting it to be over with and hoping against hope it would be good news. But it couldn’t be good, else she wouldn’t be so ill at ease, she who was never ill at ease, mistress of every situation.

And what was wrong with him? She’d admitted to forgery! She’d told him she came from a line of blue-blooded French criminals!

“My mother was Catherine DeLucey,” she said.

He recognized the surname, but it took a moment for him to place it. Then he saw it: blue, vivid blue.

“Lucie’s eyes,” he said. “Those remarkable blue eyes. Miss Sophia, too. And Miss Leonie. I knew there was something familiar about them. They’re unforgettable. The DeLuceys—the Earl of Mandeville’s family.”

Her color came and went. She folded her hands tightly in her lap.

He remembered then. Some old scandal to do with one of Lord Hargate’s sons. Not the one who’d manhandled him yesterday, though. Which one? He couldn’t remember. His brain was slow and thick and aching.

She said, “Not those DeLuceys. Not the good ones with the handsome property near Bristol. My mother was one of the other ones.”

H
e’d been leaning toward her so eagerly, and she’d seen the hope in his eyes, and the uncertainty.

Then she saw the truth dawn. His head went back, and his posture stiffened, and he looked away, unable to meet her gaze.

Sophy and Leonie had told her he didn’t need to know. They’d said she’d only heap coals on her own head, and since when had she taken on the role of martyr?