The Perfect Mistress (3 page)

Gabrielle had come home to her mother's house, hoping to convince her mother to allow her to make that choice for herself. But from the moment she arrived, Rosalind had endeavored to make
her
into a
haute courtisane
…

a pampered denizen of the high demimonde. Increasingly repelled by her mother's designs on her future, she had resisted with quiet desperation…

until tonight.

If only she could go back to those fateful moments just now in her mother's boudoir… declare herself more forcefully and insist that she be allowed a different kind of life.

"I want to wear plain flannel nightgowns… and shoes made of leather."

Glimpsing the horse residue that clung to one of her delicate satin slippers, she hissed and tried to wipe it off on the curb. "I want to play the piano again without worrying if it is too andante or too largo to excite a man. I want to read something besides romantic plays and suggestive poetry. I want to eat food that's not flambéed!" She gave up on the slipper and strode on, her eyes glowing with outrage.

"I want to take baths in plain water… hang chintz curtains… have a vicar to dinner. And I want a name to write in till-death-do-us-part strokes in a parish register… a real name, not some flowery, made-up bit of French nonsense my mother took as a
nom de plaisir
. Just an ordinary man and an ordinary name! Is that too bloody much to ask?" she demanded furiously, startling a gentleman who was passing her on the street. Embarrassed, she lowered her eyes and hurried on.

A lamppost loomed abruptly out of the darkness, and she stepped around it, continuing through the deepening gloom. The air swirled around her, tugging ominously at the delicate ruffles and flounces of her gown, but she scarcely noticed. Each step she took away from Eaton Square bolstered her determination to defy her mother's plans.

That afternoon, with the count, she had gotten a glimpse of what horrors lay in store for her. Marriage, she realized, was the only solution to her problems. Somehow, she would have to find a husband… quickly. And how on earth would she go about finding one?

As the deepening chill of the evening cooled the heat of her frustration, she tucked her arms about her waist and glanced up to find herself beside a huge iron railing. The last of the streetlamps were being lighted, and in their yellow glow she made out the drivers of passing cabs, hunched over their reins with their hats pulled low, and caught sight of crumpled newspapers and bits of debris tumbling down the street.

A cold, fat raindrop struck, and a shiver went through her as she realized that just now she had more to worry about than her mother's determination to make her into the perfect mistress. She was caught in a breaking storm, miles from home with no money and no chaperon. What had happened to her good sense? A woman alone on the street at night was in considerable danger.

Hugging herself, she hurried on and tried to think. The wind gusts grew steadily stronger, pulling at her until the pins in her carefully crafted fall of curls gave and her hair blew free. She ducked around a nearby corner and tried to right her hair as she huddled against the side of a building and surveyed the empty street. She wasn't on Piccadilly anymore. She squinted to make out the lettering on a signpost under a streetlamp nearby. "St.

James's Street." Where was that?

With mounting alarm, she looked up and down the broad thoroughfare, noting several imposing houses and buildings that had an official look about them. Despite her disheveled state, she decided that her only option was to inquire at one of those establishments for assistance. They might think her a creature of the night and send her packing, but she had no other choice.

Shivering from both cold and growing trepidation, she struck off for one of the buildings on the cross street, where the intersecting sign read Jermyn Street.

Just as she approached one ornate door, a carriage stopped on the street behind her and a pair of handsomely dressed gentlemen descended. When they saw her, with her hair in disarray and her damp voile clinging to her skin, their aristocratic faces lighted with interest and they approached her.

Looming large, their dark cloaks billowing and their eyes glowing, they suggested she accompany them to a "party" in a nearby hotel. Terrified, she jerked back just in time to avoid one man's grasp. She wheeled and bolted down the street. She didn't slow until their mocking laughter faded behind her.

Now tensely aware of her vulnerability, she blew with the wind from block to block. Her anxiety grew as the tempo of the raindrops gradually increased and as she watched carriages delivering gentlemen to fine buildings that sheltered lively establishments inside.
St. James's
. She remembered now that it wasn't just a street; it was an entire district… one that housed most of the gentlemen's clubs of London.

More than once, a carriage slowed beside her and male voices hailed her with insulting comments and offers of a night's employment. She shrank as far from the curb as she could and kept moving, her heart beating wildly. Of all the wretched precincts of London, she had had to wander into the one where men of appetite and privilege congregated! She had to find a way out of here, or there wouldn't be enough of her virtue left to seek a marriage.

Then, within the space of a block or so, the district changed. Here the buildings were shabbier, she realized, and the establishments had become more trade and tavern than club and coffeehouse. The people were the sort who plied their dubious trades in the streets regardless of the weather. Over her head, signs touted the varied establishments and entertainments of Haymarket Road.

The men with their tattered hats pulled low and the women with their frizzed hair and painted faces, all watched her with sullen speculation as she veered around them, holding her breath and praying that they wouldn't follow. But the wind at her back carried the sound of footsteps to her—big, ominous sounds of leather meeting pavement. She burst into a run. The footsteps came after her, growing steadily louder.

Panic swelled in her chest. It was difficult to breathe as she fled before the double threat of the oncoming storm and an impending attack. Closer and closer… she could hear her pursuer gaining on her with every step.

Suddenly, a hail of cold drops came crashing out of the darkness, and moments later, the sky opened up and rain poured down like a river unleashed.

Raindrops as large as pennies pelted her skin, stung her eyes, pounded through the thin fabric of her dress. The roar of the wind-driven rain obliterated every other sound, so that she could no longer hear whether her pursuer was still behind her. Guided only by the eerie, blurred glow of the streetlamps, she kept going, directionless, scarcely able to breathe in the choking downpour. Fatigue and the dragging weight of her sopping clothes gradually overwhelmed her. Desperate to escape the driving torrent, she stumbled into a doorway and huddled back against a set of weathered wooden panels. Her eyes and lungs burned, her body quaked, and her limbs felt as if they had turned to rubber.

How long she was there, dazed and chilled, trying to recover, she had no way of knowing, but it was at least long enough to regret every headstrong and "modern" impulse she had ever harbored. Now what was she going to do? As she caught her breath and the rain began to slacken, she pushed dripping strands of hair back from her face and looked around her.

"Take a g-good look, Gabby," she muttered, shivering and glancing from her own garments to the ramshackle doorway. "This could be your life if you refuse to cooperate and Mama turns you out on the streets."

Darkness burst across her vision as something loomed between her and the rain-blurred gaslight. She gasped as it took shape—a huge greatcoated figure swooping down on her out of the watery gloom…

2

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S
he was seized by the arms, hauled out of the doorway, and thrust into a carriage waiting just beyond the glare of the streetlamp. She wrestled and screamed, but she was no match for her abductor's strength. The carriage lurched into motion an instant later, and she was thrown back against the rear seat. Scrambling, she righted herself. After a pause to take her bearings, she lunged for the door and was caught, halfway there, in her abductor's steely grip.

"Help! Someone, help!" she shouted, straining toward the door and praying she could be heard in the street outside. But her frayed voice drowned in the rumble of the carriage wheels. She began to twist and shove, trying to put as much distance as possible between her and her captor. "Let me go! You have no right—"

"I have every right—every obligation to rescue you from these foul streets," the man said gruffly, wrestling with her wrists, "and to set your feet upon a higher path. Be still—I won't harm you."

Something in the calm, serious tenor of his voice made Gabrielle look at him. Rescue her? Her abductor was not one of the gentleman swells or the street toughs she'd seen earlier; he was an older man dressed in solemn black, wearing an expensive-looking top hat and a gravely serious expression. In the dim carriage light, his craggy features seemed both aged and ageless, and his dark eyes shone with an unsettling light. He apparently took her stillness for surrender and released one of her arms, settling back in the seat beside her. She wrenched her other wrist free and scooted as far from him as she could get on the seat.

"You won't get away with this," she declared, shivering.

He gave her bedraggled hair and thin, wet gown a look, and wagged his head in a way that said "poor, wretched creature" as surely as if he'd spoken it aloud. Then he leaned across the footwell to lift the seat opposite him and pull a blanket from the stowage beneath it.

"Here. Do wrap yourself and avoid a chill." He handed her the lap robe.

"We shall be there soon."

Confused by what seemed an act of consideration, she hesitated, eyeing both him and the blanket with suspicion. But her cold, rain-soaked clothing made her desperate for a bit of warmth, and she took the blanket and wrapped it around her.

"Where—where are you taking me?" she demanded with as much authority as her chattering teeth allowed. When he didn't answer right away, she glanced furtively about the carriage for some clue to her captor and his intentions. The coach's interior was solidly, if not luxuriously, appointed, with polished mahogany panels, tufted leather seats, and polished brass fittings. If he was one of the high-living gentlemen of St.

James, his coach and his demeanor did not show it.

"Someplace dry and safe… where they won't find you, my girl," he finally said, looking at her out of the corner of his eye, then staring into the darkness. "You needn't be afraid. I won't let them take you back, if you don't want to go."

Where they won't find you?
A pulse of alarm went through her. Then the second half of his statement registered, and she looked at him in surprise.
He
wouldn't let them take her back?
Had he been sent by Rosalind to search the streets for her?

"You know my mother, then?" she asked.

"Your mother? So it was your mother who sold you into this mean estate." He rubbed a gnarled hand over his eyes. "I know a thousand of your mother, my girl. Yours is a story all too common on these accursed streets."

Before she could pursue those cryptic remarks, the carriage stopped and the door swung open. Her abductor helped her from the carriage in a narrow, rain-drenched alley. She tried to bolt, but succeeded only in sinking into a cold puddle up to her ankles. At her cry of distress, her captor swung back to wrap an arm around her and bundle her through a nearby doorway.

"Take your hands off me!" He easily overcame her resistance, pulling her through a second doorway into a large kitchen with warm brick walls, large ovens and stoves, tidy worktables, and racks of hanging pots and utensils.

At one end of the long room was a huge, old-fashioned cooking hearth topped by a massive stone mantel in which old-fashioned iron pivots for cooking arms still hung. In the fireplace a small, tidy blaze burned, warming and illuminating a servant's dining table sitting on an old parlor rug. She stood staring, momentarily stunned. It seemed the unlikeliest place in the world for a ravishment.

"Over here… where you can warm yourself," he commanded, propelling her ahead of him toward the glowing hearth.

An aged butler appeared and seemed taken aback to find his master home… with such a guest. He gave her a dour look as he removed his master's coat and received instructions, then ambled off to what she presumed must be the pantries at the far end of the kitchen.

"Where are we?" she asked. She hadn't much experience with depraved and debauched males, but the strength of his features had a certain nobility about it, and the white of his hair and the intensity of his dark, almost melancholy eyes somehow didn't inspire a proper terror in her. "You cannot keep me here. I warn you: my mother has very high connections!"

"Of course she does," he said with a twist to his mouth that said what he thought of her claims.