Suzanne Robinson (18 page)

Cinched into a black silk evening gown—she was in mourning for Ophelia and didn’t have to bother with a choice of colors—Kate picked her way through the eleven courses of dinner. The meal was given in the state dining room. It was the first time Kate had seen the place, and when she walked in, she’d nearly disgraced herself by gawking at the white-and-gold paneling, the twelve-foot ceiling with gold-painted and molded plaster, the life-size paintings in ornate frames sporting winged cherubs. She was sure the picture at one end was of Charles I. At the other end of the room was a Rubens.

Juliana kindly had asked Val Beaufort to escort Kate in to dinner. To her dismay, they sat near three Honourables, the three Honourable Misses Dinkle to be precise. The young ladies were daughters of some viscount or baron, Kate couldn’t remember which. Merry and Cherry Dinkle were twins. They competed with each other to see who could be the most vapid and had the habit of twirling in unison the little bouquets they carried.

The Honourable Miss Georgiana Dinkle wasn’t much
better. She walked on tiptoe and was always saying “ain’t” in an affected way that made Kate want to ask her if she was from Texas.

Midway through dinner Kate had managed to fix the names of several more people in her head. There was what she referred to as the “great beauty” contingent—the Countess of Landsborne, Mademoiselle St.-Germain, and Lady Fiona Churchill-Smythe. Kate didn’t like any of the three. She decided her antipathy arose from several causes. None of them had corsets that creaked, they all could walk in their hoops without getting stuck in doors, and each wanted to monopolize Alexis de Granville.

Alexis, Kate noticed, was adept at skirmishing with the various females who made forays at him. He flitted from one to the other, dodged the Honourable Dinkles and Mama Dinkle, and spent most of his time with a woman named Carolina Beechwith. Everyone seemed to like Mrs. Beechwith, but Kate hadn’t had a chance to talk to her.

As it happened, she was saved from having to talk much at dinner anyway, because everyone wanted to hear about the Crimea from the Earl of Cardigan. Kate listened to the man’s recounting of the charge of the Light Brigade while keeping an eye on Val. To her surprise, the young man kept his gaze on his plate during the whole story. When it was over, she began to relax her vigilance, but Val lifted his eyes and looked at the earl. If there was an opening into hell, it was in those blue eyes. They held lakes of fire, the rack, howling fiends, and the lust for blood. Kate put her hand over Val’s. He blinked and lowered his gaze.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Alexis has set a watch on me. Colonel Maude and Sir Humphrey. I can’t get near Cardigan without one of them pulling me away.”

“Good,” Kate said.

“And since the guests have arrived, he’s been surrounded by women. I don’t understand it. They love him.
Always have. Did you know he’s been cited for criminal conversation?”

“What’s that?”

Val laughed without humor. “That, Miss Grey, is what the legal man calls seducing another man’s wife.”

Kate took in the simpering faces of the women near the earl and lifted an eyebrow.

“Yes,” Val said. “It almost rivals the de Granville charm, doesn’t it?”

She switched her attention to the head of the table where Alexis held court. It was disgusting, she thought. Lady Churchill-Smythe kept leaning toward him and hanging on his words as though he were the Archbishop of Canterbury. Mademoiselle St.-Germain cast hot-wax looks at him that he returned with composure, and the Countess of Landsborne actually touched him. Kate was glad when it was time for the ladies to remove themselves. If she had to watch those women cavort in front of Alexis much longer, she would need a glass of port herself.

The ladies’ retreat was held in the Red Drawing Room. Kate stepped into the chamber and at once felt as if she needed a pair of spectacles with dark lenses. The room got its name from its red lacquer paneling. Finished with gilding, draped with red Italian silk curtains, furnished with red damask couches and chairs, the place was as much a shock as the gold dining room. She walked a circuit of the room with her mother. Sophia’s step was quick and her smile bright with contentment at being among what she called the Cream of Society. Kate couldn’t adjust to the red room.

Facing a mirror that reflected the hue of her surroundings at her, she winced and spoke to her mother.

“Think somebody likes red?”

“Kate, hush. This room is almost three hundred years old. That painting is a Raphael, and Lady Juliana told me that table once belonged to Marie Antoinette.”

“It’s red.”

Sophia twisted the lid on her scent bottle. “Oh, Kate, do be quiet.”

Kate submitted to being tugged into a corner beside a china cabinet. “You must be on your best behavior. Lady Juliana is furious.”

“But I haven’t done anything. Lately.”

“Not at you. At the marquess. He brought Her.”

“Her?” Kate said.

“Her,” Sophia repeated in a frightened-doe voice. She nodded in the direction of the three Dinkles.

“The Dinkles?”

“No, Her.”

Following the direction of Sophia’s gaze, Kate spied the generously endowed figure of Carolina Beechwith.

“Mrs. Beechwith?” Kate’s hands and feet lost sensation, and it seemed as if she were looking at the room through a window.

“Yes, that Beechwith person.” Sophia edged closer to Kate and turned her back to the woman they were discussing. “She’s his, his … And he brought her to his home. It’s an insult. You mustn’t speak to her. Avoid being in her presence.”

“Criminal conversation,” Kate said.

Her mother kept talking, but Kate didn’t listen. For the first time, she really looked at Carolina Beechwith. The woman had thick chestnut hair that shone in any light, and her lips were naturally pink. She had a squarish face, but her eyes were so large and round that one didn’t notice. And those eyes were almost night-sky blue, the kind of blue that made one think of tropical birds and lapis lazuli.

Mrs. Beechwith and Alexis. Mrs. Beechwith lived in Heppleton. Mrs. Beechwith had an elderly husband, an absent husband. Mrs. Beechwith also had Alexis.

Kate felt sick. Her corset was too tight. The food she’d
eaten was stuck somewhere between her throat and her waist, and it was going to come back up.

She even had taste, this Mrs. Beechwith. She wore a gown of pearl gray satin with none of the fussy tucks, frills, or tiers worn by the other women in the room. Worst of all, she was clever enough to wear a more modest neckline. Kate looked down at her own chest. Hannah had insisted that shoulders and bosom were displayed at evening affairs. “I feel like one of the figures on the prow of a ship,” Kate had muttered.

Mrs. Beechwith had the right idea. If everyone else went about jiggling and bouncing, one would gain more notice by covering up.

“Mama, did you say Lord Alexis invited Mrs. Beechwith? When?”

“I don’t know,” Sophia said. “But Lady Juliana didn’t know she was coming until yesterday.”

“Yesterday.” That was the day he’d come to her in the Clocktower. The day she almost let him—

The men burst into the room, their tenor voices cutting across the prevailing soprano hum. Black tailcoats streamed forth, and Kate found herself surrounded by three of them. Lady Juliana introduced a scholar from Cambridge, a clergyman, and a lord. Juliana remarked on Kate’s interest in literature, and three pairs of eyes lit up. To her surprise, she was drawn into a real conversation. It was regrettable she was too hurt to enjoy her first taste of popularity.

There was nothing to be done but talk. So she talked about Blake and Dryden and Wordsworth, about Thackeray and Trollope and Dickens. All the while she watched Alexis de Granville work his way from Dinkle to Dinkle to Dinkle to Countess to Mademoiselle, all with the intent of cornering Mrs. Beechwith.

Her nausea returned. Because she was watching the lovers, she was startled when the Earl of Cardigan swept
down on her little group and sent the scholar, the clergyman, and the lord skittering away. The earl offered his arm and escorted her to a settee. With her permission, he sat beside her. Kate wondered if he’d chosen the small sofa on purpose. There was room only for the two of them. Hellfire. She couldn’t see Alexis and that woman from where she was sitting.

She fished in the pocket of her skirt for her black-bordered handkerchief. Twisting it in her hands, she wished it was Alexis de Granville’s beautiful neck.

The Earl of Cardigan bent toward her and touched her skirt with one finger.

“What?” Kate asked.

“I asked if you have been avoiding me, Miss Grey.”

“Of course not, my lord.”

“I thought perhaps you didn’t care for soldiers.”

She dragged her attention back to the earl. “I don’t have a thing against soldiers.”

Cardigan’s glance oozed down her face and took a sleigh ride all the way to her feet. Kate had to stop herself from hunching her shoulders forward to make her chest seem smaller. Annoyed with herself for acting like a schoolgirl, she deliberately smiled at the earl. He had an elegantly trimmed mustache and soft curls at his temples.

“Miss Grey, I hope you will allow me to spend more time with you. If I may be permitted a small liberty, I would like to say that your beauty makes me wish I had been born an American gentleman instead of an Englishman.”

Never having had much practice at accepting compliments, Kate had no idea how to reply. At least she didn’t blush and giggle. She settled for a calm thank you. The admiring inclination of his head told her she had made the right decision.

Success with one compliment evidently called for more of the same in the earl’s estimation. The blandishments
kept coming. Kate began to feel like a rum cake being doused with glaze. Discomfort gave way to astonishment when the man captured her hand and kissed it, then replaced it in her lap so quickly, she almost thought she’d imagined the touch. At the same moment she saw a movement across the room and was transfixed by the wrathful gaze of the Marquess of Richfield.

He was angry. What did he have to be angry with her about? The snake. He’d taken up a post beside the liquor cabinet and was watching her and the earl. She stiffened her spine and favored Cardigan with another smile. When she next looked at the liquor cabinet, Alexis was handing a glass of wine to Mrs. Beechwith.

“Hellfire,” Kate said.

The earl laughed. “What an expression.”

She was saved by Lady Juliana. They were all to ascend to the curtain wall of the castle to view the surrounding landscape by moonlight.

The earl offered his arm. Kate took it, and they followed Lady Juliana with the rest of her guests. As they donned mantles and capes and progressed like lords and ladies in a court procession, the earl leaned down and whispered in her ear.

“I confess, Miss Grey. It isn’t the landscape I long to see by moonlight.”

Alexis had thought himself clever to seek the company of the dean and old Lady Wickworth. He’d maneuvered it so that the three of them were in step behind Cardigan and Kate. The bastard wasn’t going to seduce that particular female, even if Alexis had to throw him in the dungeon.

From the moment he’d seen Cardigan approach Kate, Alexis had been thinking of his dungeon. When the earl’s lips had touched her hand, Alexis had felt his composure warp like a portcullis assaulted by a battering ram. She had smiled at the slavering animal, and Alexis had begun to review the various torture instruments gathering mold in the dungeon.

Thumb screws were too tame. There was the iron chair used to lower a victim gradually into a blazing fire.

The earl put an arm around Kate’s
waist to help her up the stairs to the curtain walk.

He could use the boots. High leather boots were put on a victim’s feet, then boiling water was poured over them. It penetrated the leather and ate away the flesh. Still too tame. Anyway, Cardigan’s feet were too small.

He searched his memory. Hot pitch. Hanging with two-hundred-and-fifty-pound weights. Now that sounded promising.

Cardigan whispered something in Kate’s ear that made her laugh.

He could throw the bastard in the oubliette—that small, black hole in the bedrock below the dungeon, where there was only enough room for a man to lie down. After the hue and cry of the search died down, he could put Cardigan to the rack.

Lost in his fantasy, Alexis forgot to keep up with the dean and Lady Wickworth. He emerged upon the curtain wall in a rage that would have gratified the savage Phillipe de Granville. Cardigan had attached himself tick-wise to Kate and wasn’t letting go. Alexis veered around a countess and the master of the local hunt, aiming at his intended victim, and was brought up short by a covey of Dinkles.

“Oooooo, my lord, do point out the best views for us,” said Miss Cherry Dinkle.

Alexis started to retreat, but he was surrounded. In a trice there were Dinkles to the left and right of him, and one—a twin—hovered in front of him twirling her bouquet. Georgiana Dinkle filched his right arm and wouldn’t give it back. Merry Dinkle blocked his escape route to the left by dropping her bouquet so that he had to pick it up for her. As he righted himself, his free arm was captured. There was nothing for it but complete surrender.

He became a guide. He pointed out the constellations, the mountains on the moon, the distant hills, and suffered
paroxysms of irritation at the gushing ooooo’s and aaaaah’s his statements elicited. If he hadn’t tried at the same time to keep an eye on Kate and her stalker, he wouldn’t have been duped into showing Miss Georgiana Dinkle the Watch Tower.

They entered the tower from the wall walk. A priest at the funeral of a child couldn’t have been more somber as he conducted the young lady down the winding stone stairs. He showed her munitions rooms, guardrooms, storerooms, but the Dinkle seemed to be interested in a bedchamber.

Shoving open an oak door, she rushed into a fifteenth-century room outfitted with dark paneling, Tudor period portraits, and a small bed.

“Oh, how clever of you to have a little room like this so near, Lord Alexis.”