The Pleasure Trap (5 page)

Her mind was still dwelling on the inexplicable wave of hatred that seemed to assault her during the symposium. And when she’d turned around to find the source, there was Ash Denison looking straight at her.

She sat on the edge of the bed and absently hugged herself as though she were chilled through and through. According to Lady Sayers, he was immensely popular because of his gracious manners. His manners were anything but gracious when he’d talked to her about her book. The words burned inside her brain:
flowery prose, exaggerated emotions, an anemic hero.

Her heroes were
safe.
She trusted them. She wouldn’t trust Lord Denison beyond saying “How do you do?” It amused him to trifle with a country bumpkin. That’s what he thought of her. That’s how he’d summed her up. Well, she had more sense than to be swayed by the opinions of a man who was nothing but an affected fop.

She was tidying herself in readiness to go downstairs when her aunt entered.

“Are you all right, dear?” asked Miss Claverley. “Lady Sayers told me you were not feeling quite the thing.”

“It was the heat,” Eve replied. She studied her aunt for some sign that she’d sensed the presence of something malevolent, too, but Miss Claverley, who really had a sixth sense, merely looked concerned.

“It was nerves, I suppose,” said Miss Claverley. “You’re always so tense at these affairs. I can’t think why. You do so well.”

Eve shrugged. “It wasn’t the best symposium I’ve attended.”

“No, indeed. Those dreadful men trying to make trouble! Lord Denison soon put a stop to their game. What was the fuss about? Who is this Angelo?”

“I haven’t the least idea. Shall we return to the others?”

“If you’re feeling up to it, dear.”

“Oh, I’m up to anyone and anything,” Eve stated, and she ushered her aunt through the door.

Chapter Four

On the appointed morning of Brand Hamilton’s return, Ash arrived at the
Herald
’s offices in Soho. He was still determined to discover Angelo’s identity. Most people would have given up at this point. It wasn’t as though Angelo had committed a crime. But Ash couldn’t let it go at that. He truly believed that Angelo had written about his family, and he wanted to know how Angelo had come to know so much. Who had told him? That he’d changed the names of his characters and settings didn’t fool Ash for one moment. Angelo was privy to secrets that only Ash should have known, and he felt as though his innermost thoughts had been broken into and ransacked.

But that wasn’t what drove him to unmask Angelo. It was the uncertainty surrounding Harry’s death that constantly gnawed at him.

He found Brand at his desk with that morning’s paper spread out in front of him. He and Brand had been friends since their school days. Once, they’d been alike, but now they seemed like opposites. Brand set goals for himself and strove to attain them. Ash had long since given up striving to please anyone but himself. He enjoyed the finer things in life. Brand’s tastes were Spartan, though his marriage to Lady Marion had had an effect. Nothing was too good for Marion.

There was another friend, Jack, in much the same position as Brand. Ash was godfather to his friends’ children. Each had an infant son who was born within a month of the other. The standing joke was that when Ash became a father, his world view would shift on its axis.

They did not know that it had shifted on its axis when Harry died.

Brand’s eyebrows rose quizzically. “Now, what has put that look on your face?” he asked.

Ash’s expression cleared, and he pulled up a chair. “I was thinking,” he said easily, “that with the right clothes and setting, you could pass yourself off as a buccaneer.”

Brand grinned. “I’ve been called worse.”

They spent the next little while catching up on each other’s news, though there wasn’t much to catch up. Now that Brand had bought a house for his family in Cavendish Square, they saw each other regularly.

When the pleasantries were over, Brand said, “So, what brings you here?”

Ash had rehearsed what he was going to say. Though Brand was his friend, his knowledge of Ash’s boyhood was sketchy at best, and that was how Ash wanted to keep it, especially now that Brand was a newspaper man. Brand could nose out a story a mile off. He might not publish it, for friendship’s sake, but he would not let it rest until he had uncovered every dark and dangerous secret. Some family secrets were too shameful to share.

Ash said, “Your editor may have told you that I’m trying to track down one of your contributors, a fellow named Angelo?”

Brand nodded. “Yes, Adam mentioned that you’d been asking about him. What’s your interest here, Ash?”

“I’m acting for a friend,” said Ash, and he began to give Brand a summary of the colonel’s grievance.

Brand stopped him before he got very far. “You’re acting for Colonel Shearer, aren’t you?”

When Ash nodded, Brand sighed. “I don’t know what’s got into the old boy. He seems to think that Angelo has set one of his stories in his country estate. I can’t see it. These stately gardens are all the same. I’ve tried to tell him that these are works of fiction, but he won’t listen. He seems to think I’m protecting Angelo, but I’m not.” Brand spread his hands. “I don’t know who Angelo is. All I know is that a batch of stories, three in all, arrived at my office with a promise of more to come if we decided to publish. We liked them and published them, and now we’re waiting for the next batch to arrive.”

When Brand paused, Ash said, “How did you pay for them?”

“I deposited the funds—twenty pounds it was—in Angelo’s name in his bank, Ransom, Morland, and Company in Pall Mall. Those were my instructions, and I followed them to the letter.”

Ash frowned and sat back in his chair. “You followed them to the letter? Isn’t that a bit melodramatic? Why the secrecy? Why didn’t Angelo come in person for his money?”

Brand shrugged. “Perhaps Angelo is a public figure and if his identity were to become known, it would hurt his career.”

This was a new twist. “Is that what you think?” Ash asked slowly.

“Lord, no!” responded Brand at once. “I think he is a female, you know, one of those writers of Gothic romances that are all the rage right now. That’s why we publish them, to appeal to our female readers. I suppose that’s why Angelo chose us. Only the
Herald
publishes the kind of stories he writes.”

Ash gazed down at his highly polished boots as he sifted through what Brand had told him. There were more stories to come. What was the significance of that? He discarded the idea of approaching Angelo’s bank for his name and direction. Ransom, Morland, and Company guarded their clients’ secrets like priests in a confessional.

Brand broke the silence. “Colonel Shearer reacted as though he’d been held up to ridicule in Angelo’s story. I tried to assure him that no one would connect him to it and that the best thing to do was ignore it.”

“Is that your advice to me?”

“Unless there’s something you’re not telling me.”

That was the thing about Brand, Ash reminded himself. He was a newspaperman and could nose out a story a mile off.

“You know how it is.” He spread his hands. “Shearer and I served together in the Spanish Campaign. I promised him I’d look into it and that’s what I’m doing.”

“You always had a soft heart!” said Brand.

“Don’t I know it!”

Ash’s next port of call was Leigh Fleming’s house in Wimpole Street. A portly, placid-faced butler led him up a flight of stairs to a dwarfish room that had the grand title of “library.”

The house was not what Ash had expected. It was too feminine, too fussy, with too many ornaments on every available flat surface. Fleming was not an effeminate man as far as appearances went, and Ash wondered whether the house was rented or was an example of artistic temperament.

Fleming seemed pleased to see him, until he realized that Amanda would not be joining them. He waved Ash to a chair, then seated himself.

“Joining us?” Ash repeated, removing an embroidered cushion from his back and depositing it on a nearby sofa.

“Well, not up here in my masculine domain. I meant in my mother’s drawing room.”

Enlightenment dawned. “Ah. You live with your mother.”

“She’s an invalid. Lady Amanda mentioned that she might drop by for a visit.”

“I see,” said Ash, and wasn’t particularly thrilled with the thought that occurred to him. Fleming and Amanda? A man who lived in a fussy house with an invalid mother and made his living promoting romantic ideals that no one could live up to lacked something essential, in his opinion. It wasn’t manly.

“So,” said Fleming, “how may I help you?”

This required diplomacy and tact with a generous helping of subterfuge stirred into the mix. Ash had no desire to get Fleming all fired up before he’d got what he wanted, and what Ash wanted was information on Fleming’s writers so that he could narrow the field of suspects.

Amanda had been helpful. She’d attended several symposiums and had become friendly with some of the authors, but the information she had unwittingly passed on was superficial. Ash needed more to work with than that.

“You’re aware, I suppose,” he said, “that my cousin, Lady Amanda, has struck up a friendship with some of your authors?”

Fleming replied cautiously, “I’m aware of it.”

“I’m not sure that I approve.”

Fleming stiffened. “My writers may not be blue bloods, but I assure you they are all respectable, decent people who live quiet, uneventful lives.”

“Good grief, man! That’s not what bothers me! Have you forgotten what happened at the symposium? Those hecklers could have turned nasty. And now that Mrs. Rivers is practically claiming to be Angelo, I’m afraid for my cousin’s safety if she is seen in her company.”

Fleming’s jaw worked. “Lydia? Claiming to be Angelo? She’s lying! She doesn’t have Angelo’s vocabulary. She’d need a dictionary at her elbow before she embarked on any of his stories. That’s what makes Lydia unique. Her prose is simple!”

Ash had hoped that Mrs. Rivers would turn out to be Angelo, because it would have made his task so much easier, but he wasn’t surprised that Fleming ridiculed the suggestion. After his own conversation with her, he’d come to the conclusion that all she wanted was to be the center of attention, and claiming to be Angelo had certainly done that.

Fleming shook his head. “All she wants is attention. I shouldn’t be angry with her. I should feel sorry for her. But really, she is her own worst enemy.”

“How do you mean?”

Fleming reached across his desk for a decanter, and when Ash nodded, he poured out two careful measures of sherry into two crystal glasses.

One sip of the sherry made Fleming’s credit rise in Ash’s eyes. Ash knew his sherries, and this was vintage.

In the way of a true connoisseur, Fleming rolled the sherry on his tongue before swallowing. “Lydia,” he said, “keeps house for a sister who has fallen out with all her neighbors. A most unpleasant lady, I hear, but very religious. She has no idea that her younger sister has this secret life as a writer, and if she did know, she’d put a stop to it. She controls the purse strings, you see. This annual outing to London is the high point of Lydia’s life. I think that she’s desperate to meet someone who will offer her marriage and take her away from her dreary existence. And the more desperate she becomes, the more men keep their distance.”

“Why doesn’t she break away from her sister,” Ash asked, “and start a new life somewhere else? She already earns her own living, doesn’t she?”

Fleming shrugged. “Starting from scratch is not cheap. Where would she live? How would she find the funds to furnish a house and pay servants? And if she should stop writing or the public stopped buying her books—what then? She’d have to return to her sister’s house, if she’d have her. Not a pleasant prospect, is it?”

“I had no idea.”

“No. Most men don’t realize how few choices women have.” He sighed and sipped his sherry. “I’ll have a word with Lydia,” he said, “and tell her to stop claiming to be Angelo. Will that set your mind at rest?”

Ash shook his head. “There’s something else. These women don’t use their own names. Who are they? What are they hiding? What do they do when they leave London? Who can vouch for them?”

Fleming bristled. “I can vouch for them.”

Ash spread his hands. “Please do.”

He half-expected Fleming to show him the door. Instead, Fleming topped up their glasses, settled back in his chair, and finally said, “There are only four who have stayed on with Lady Sayers, so there’s no point in mentioning those who went home after the symposium. You were right about the hecklers. That’s what frightened them away. Where shall I begin?”

“Tell me about Mrs. Barrymore,” Ash prompted. “I know she has accepted Lady Sayers’s invitation.”

“Her name is Eve Dearing. Like the others, she’s a single woman and lives quietly with her aunt in the pretty village of Henley. She rarely comes up to town. Her father and stepmother live in Brighton. He was a landscape gardener before he retired and worked with some famous names. Lancelot Brown comes to mind.”

“Capability Brown? He is a legend.”

“I believe George Dearing was his apprentice at one time.”

Ash thought for a moment. “What happened to Miss Dearing’s mother?”

“Oh, she died in a tragic accident when Eve was very young. When Mr. Dearing remarried, Eve went to live with her mother’s sister.”

“I see.” That suggested to Ash that Eve and her father were not very close. What interested him, however, was her father’s occupation. It was true that the layout of the estates in the Angelo stories were vague, but the gardens themselves were so vividly brought to life that only someone who loved gardens could have done such a masterly job.

Was it possible that George Dearing was Angelo? Two writers in one family? It was far more likely to be the daughter.

“Then there’s Miss Claverley,” said Fleming. “She is not a writer but Eve’s aunt, the one in Henley I mentioned. They’re very close. She is what I would call eccentric!” To the question in Ash’s eyes, he elaborated, “She’s ‘fey,’ you know, she has a sixth sense that can be quite uncanny. She is very popular with all my writers.

“As for Anna Contini, that is her real name. Anna is a wealthy widow. She has a huge spread in Cornwall that she has turned over as a refuge for broken-down donkeys and ponies. I know it’s true because I’ve been there. She converses more easily with those animals than she does with people, but she is quite harmless.”

Ash found himself warming to the vampirish lady. He had a soft spot for castoffs, whether they were people or animals.

They spoke back and forth, but there wasn’t much more Fleming could tell him about this reclusive, private lady.

The silence lengthened. Fleming grew restive. Finally, he said, “I’ve been frank with you, Denison. Perhaps I’ve told you more than I ought. I can’t believe, however, that a man of the world, such as yourself, would imagine that Lady Amanda would be in harm’s way from these inoffensive ladies.”