To Seduce an Angel (5 page)

Emma used the knot for a door that led nowhere. The Castello di Malgrate had had dozens of such doors, bricked over when it had become a prison. No light penetrated its interior through the walls, only through the vast open courtyard in the center where the executioner did his work.

Once she had counted her steps and marked the doors of Daventry Hall, she could escape in the darkest night.

When she had wound and tied her thread, she rang the bell. Mr. Creevey, who had led her to the chapel, appeared and led her down the dizzying stone stairway with ancient dark timbers that doubled back on itself to the entrance hall. Emma counted sixteen steps in each flight.

Emma waited where Mr. Creevey left her, thinking of the work she had to do. Overhead and around her the vast household loomed, a grand maze for a trapped mouse like herself.

At last the housekeeper and a maid appeared. The housekeeper, Mrs. Creevey, was a tall woman with deep red hair peeking out from under her white cap and alert hazel eyes. Her majestic bosom strained against the moss-colored bodice of her gown. A dozen keys jangled at her waist. With her was her daughter, a girl not much younger than Emma herself with a wide, vividly freckled face, prominent hazel eyes, and rusty brown curls under her cap. She had her mother's bosom but none of her beauty.

Mrs. Creevey looked Emma over. A severe frown drew her brows to a sharp vee. “Daventry has irregular ways, miss, for a man of his station. It is not my place to alter them, but I run a regular household. Of that you may be assured. There will be clean linens, hot food, and properly laid fires. Ruth will show you to your room.” She turned to her daughter. “Now, mind your tongue, Ruth.” She strode off.

The girl dropped Emma a curtsy. “Your trunk's arrived, miss, and His Lordship says you're to have the blue room.”

Ruth led Emma back up the stairs to the floor below the schoolroom and opened the door to a room such as Emma had not entered since her childhood, a room for a princess. Walls as blue as a clear sky rose to a high white ceiling. A large tester bed with a simple white coverlet was canopied in chintz hangings patterned with vivid red chrysanthemums. The white moldings had gilt edges, and on the vast carpet gold ribbons intertwined on a cream field. Light from the soaring windows made Emma blink.

It was nothing like the modest room in the servants' wing to which the duchess had assigned Emma at Wenlocke. No wonder Mrs. Creevey had frowned so at her. The elegant room was far above Emma's position as temporary tutor to a group of rough boys. But it must mean nothing to an eccentric rich man, such a room. What did he care where his wards' tutor slept when his splendid house had dozens of rooms? He lived here alone with servants and those lost boys. She knew them. They were the fruit thieves and port rats of her childhood, scrambling and squabbling over a few coins tossed from a passing carriage. As a child she had never envied them, until they remained free when she and Tatty were locked up.

The puzzle was how such boys had come to live here in this palace of a house. She wondered if they and their master were under some enchantment and thought how Tatty would laugh such an idea to scorn. Nothing magic about money, Tatty would say. Emma would teach them, but she would keep her distance. She would not love them as she had begun to love the sweet children in the duchess's school.

“Ruth, is there a governess's room somewhere?”

“Was, miss, a little old room upstairs next to the schoolroom, but with seven boys, all the upstairs rooms are filled. There's old Hodge's room, that was the grinder, but that's in the other wing by the library. You'd be right lonely on that side of the house. Nobody goes there much except Daventry, and the family when they come. Mum thinks . . . but I should not say what mum thinks.”

A lumbering man, with a heavy brow and shoulders wide as a hay cart, brought Emma's trunk into the room. Emma froze. The fairy-tale room came with its own ogre. His hands were as big as Emma's head. Ruth showed no fear but directed him to stand the trunk in the dressing room as if it were nothing to order a giant about.

“No need to be afraid of Adam Digweed, miss,” Ruth assured her. “He won't hurt ye. He protects Daventry is all.”

“Protects him?” So Daventry knew the threat against him. She had no doubt that Adam Digweed would crush an adversary first and interrogate the corpse after.

“Ye must have heard the story, miss. It's been in the papers for months. Mum didn't like it, but Da saved the papers to read us all the Chancery Court doings at Sunday supper. How Daventry came to be lord here after years of being lost in London and how his own grandfather hates him something fierce.”

“Are those papers still about, Ruth? I'd like to read the story.” She hoped Ruth wouldn't see the obvious flaw in her request. If she were who she claimed to be, she would know a scandal that filled the London papers.

“Bless me, miss, Mum tossed them on the fire first chance she had.”

“But you could tell me the story.”

Ruth's mouth opened. The girl was a talker. Her natural disposition was trusting and open, but she clamped her lips shut tight.

“Mum would have my head if I started speechifying like they do in Parliament. Now, miss, we'll get ye settled and ready for supper in a trice if ye'll give me your trunk key.”

Emma fished the little key from her bag and handed it to Ruth, who made quick work of opening the trunk, then stopped dead and turned to Emma.

“Beg pardon, miss, but is this the right trunk?”

Emma followed Ruth's gaze, and they stared together at a gold silk gown with a bodice that was no more than a twisted rope of blue and gold that would never conceal Emma's breasts. The dress was wicked, a dress made for seduction, light and fluid and made to rustle and whisper and cling. Tatty at seventeen had told Emma fourteen all about seduction. Seduction, Tatty said was the art of bringing men to their knees, and women must practice it only on men they loved to distraction.

Emma had protested that there were no men to seduce, only their jailers and Leo. She had wanted to know then how a woman could learn such arts without any men. Tatty had laughed and promised that her first free action would be to find Emma the right man to practice on. Emma thought of her heart racing at Daventry's touch and her own need to put her fingers to his scarred wrist. Apparently Emma's heart had the sense of a loon. Daventry could not be the right man. Mixing spying and seduction was like setting the table and inviting bad luck to take the best seat.

“Don't you have the prettiest gowns, miss?” Ruth was saying.

Emma studied her trunk again. She might have thought it the wrong trunk, a mix-up at the inn in which the gowns of a fashionable lady of leisure and license had been sent with Emma, but it was plainly the trunk on which Wallop's hand had rested as he warned her,
You play by Josiah Wallop's rules now, missy, or you hang.

“My last employer gave me her old gowns.”

“Lordy, miss, she was rich as a queen. I'll just hang this one in the press, miss.”

“Thank you.” Emma turned away to let Ruth unpack while her brain worked furiously at what Aubrey meant by putting such gowns in her trunk. He did nothing unintentional or careless, but the rich gown did not fit the story they'd invented for Emma at all. Emma's few gowns from the duchess were plain muslins and kerseymere wools of modest, high-necked cut. She had managed to take just two with her though they suited the version of her life Aubrey had put in her papers. Those papers said she was a vicar's daughter fallen on hard times since her father's death. Aubrey had been amused to give a murderess such a history. He had made her study the false documents in the carriage.

Emma could hear Ruth uttering sighs of admiration over the clothes as she hung them up. The rich gowns made no sense. Emma was supposed to be a vicar's daughter who would never own such clothes. A spy should be invisible.

She stared out the windows. White clouds billowed in towering formations in the bright sky. Beyond a stand of somber dark trees the view stretched away north toward distant purple hills. The unfamiliar English landscape rose and dipped in a rolling stretch of countryside as unlike home as a desert. There were no silvery olives or rows of tall slender cypress or groves of oranges. There were no mountains, only fields and woods in shades of coffee and chocolate with hints of new green in the hedges and ditches. She missed the warm gold and deep green of her native country and its clear geography with the mountains to the east and north and the sea to the south and west. England seemed a brown and gray coverlet with a hundred dips and turns and no straight paths. She and Tatty had lost their way a dozen times before they'd come to Reading and met the spy.

Emma touched her pocket, feeling for the little pin she kept there, for luck. In two weeks those woods might begin to green with the spring, but even then they would hardly offer the leafy concealment she needed. Perhaps she would have better luck on the other side of the house.

Tatty always said they just needed luck to escape, but Emma knew that luck was useless without a good plan. A good plan mixed patience and opportunity with distraction. With the right mix a woman could escape. Without it she was crow meat.

“Beg pardon, miss, but what will ye want to wear to dinner?”

Emma came to stand beside Ruth. The maid had filled the press and closed up the trunk. Nothing seemed right for a servant invited to take supper with her employer. The bright silks had low bodices, elaborate sleeves, and skirts flaring from narrow waists. The shoes were even more elegant and twice as useless. Aubrey's choice dismayed her, dainty slippers to match the silken gowns. It was not a wardrobe to escape in.

She turned to Ruth. “I suppose I must wear this dress.”

Ruth put her hands on her hips and looked Emma up and down. With sudden decision she turned to the press and pulled out a poppy-colored India muslin with sprigs of gold. The short full sleeves would bare Emma's arms, and the bodice was shockingly low, but the dress would not cling immodestly like the gold one.

Ruth looked on the dress with favor. “If we tuck some lace in the bodice and put a wrap about your shoulders, it will not be so . . .”

“Low?”

“Right, miss. Now if you'll let me, I'll do you up proper.”

“If you tell me Daventry's story. I know you're dying to.”

Ruth grinned. “Oh, miss, you'll bring the wrath of Mum down upon me sure.”

“Is she very hard on you, Ruth?”

“Not as hard as on me sisters Violet and Hyacinth. Mum called me Ruth because she said two wicked foolish girls were enough in one family. She saw I was born to be plain and no beauty, so maybe I would not take after my sisters, but she says I've a way with ladies' things.”

“I'm grateful to have you, Ruth.”

Emma let Ruth help her out of her worn gown and into the poppy-colored muslin. Ruth seated Emma on a cushioned bench and began to brush Emma's hair, her movements brisk and deft as she arranged Emma's curls in a loose knot at the back of her head. Working with her hands seemed to free Ruth's tongue.

“Daventry won't let us call him
lord
, but he is one just the same, a marquess and all. His mother is a great beauty, Miss Sophie Rhys-Jones. Mum says we've got to treat her with respect, but she's got a scandalous past for sure. When Daventry's father fell in love with her, he had to marry her in secret. Then he went off to India and died. So Daventry grew up in London instead of here. He never knew his father. They say he did not even know his parents had married. He thought he was baseborn.”

“His mother did not tell him the truth?”

Ruth paused with the brush and shook her head. “They say she couldn't, miss, because of his grandfather, that's the duke. He's a powerful, cold old dragon. He was dead against Daventry's mamma, so she kept the marriage secret for near thirteen years even when she was a widow. She and Daventry's father came here for their wedding night. My mum was in service then, just married herself. She says she never saw a husband and wife so happy.”

Emma nodded. Only youth could explain it, for Mrs. Creevey did not seem the sort of woman who would notice the happiness of young lovers.

Ruth teased a few curls about Emma's ears. “Years and years later the secret got out. Someone told the old duke he had a grandson. And our Daventry was snatched right off the streets of London.”

Emma knew why. She had heard the icy voice full of disdain pronounce Daventry to be a
whore's get
. Still she had to ask. “Snatched?”

“Just a boy he was. It happened during an exhibition mill with the champion, old Tom Cribb. Hundreds of gentlemen came, and our Daventry was there, too, with his older brother. He wanted to be a miller even then, same as now.”

“A miller?”

“A miller's a prizefighter, miss, one who's handy with his fives, you know. Gentlemen are all mad for milling.”

Emma wondered if it was the prizefighting that explained his scars. She could not ask about them without admitting that private moment between herself and her employer. “Go on, Ruth.”

“Daventry was on his way home with his oldest brother Sir Alexander when some ruffians attacked the king himself in that old yellow coach of his, and while Daventry's brother fought them, Dav vanished—stolen, right off the streets. The family searched for years to find him.”

“And where was he?”

“Living in the lowest streets with that band of his.”

Emma tried to make sense of it. First he had been stolen, then he had been free and living in the streets, but he hadn't returned to his family. “You mean the boys I'm to teach? Are they all orphans?”