Vice (37 page)

“I didn’t know until just now that he’d returned,” Tarquin said. “I wouldn’t have let him near you if I had. Believe me, Juliana.” She was shivering violently and he laid a hand on her arm, his expression tight with anger and remorse. “Go to your apartments now and leave this with me. Henny will attend to your hurts. I’ll come to you shortly.”

“He hit me with that damned whip,” Juliana said, catching her breath on an angry sob.

“He’ll pay for it,” Tarquin said grimly. Fleetingly, he touched her cheek. “Now, do as you’re bid.”

Juliana cast one last, scornful look at the still convulsed Lucien and trailed away, all the bounce gone from her step.

Tarquin said with soft savagery, “I want you out of my house within the hour, Edgecombe.”

Lucien looked up, struggling for breath. His eyes were bloodshot, filled with pain, but his tongue was still pure venom. “Well, well,” he drawled. “Reneging on an agreement, my dear cousin! Shame on you. The shining example of honor and duty has feet of clay, after all.”

A pulse flicked in Tarquin’s temple, but he spoke without emotion. “I was a fool to have thought it possible to
have an honorable agreement with you. I consider the contract null and void. Now, get out of my house.”

“Giving up on me at last, Tarquin?” Lucien pushed himself up until he was sagging against the wall. His deep-sunk eyes glittered suddenly. “You promised me once you would never give up on me. You said that you would always stand by me even when no one else would. You said blood was thicker than water. Do you remember that?” His voice had a whine to it, but his eyes still glittered with a strange triumph.

Tarquin stared down at him, pity and contempt in his gaze. “Yes, I remember,” he said. “You were a twelve-year-old liar and a thief, and in my godforsaken naïveté I thought maybe it wasn’t your fault. That you needed to be accepted by the family in order to become one of us—”

“You never accepted me in the family,” Lucien interrupted, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “You and Quentin despised me from the first moment you laid eyes on me.”

“That’s not true,” Tarquin said steadfastly. “We gave you every benefit of the doubt, knowing the disadvantages of your upbringing.”

“Disadvantages!” Lucien sneered, the blue bruises standing out against his greenish pallor. “A demented father and a mother who never left her bed.”

“We did what we could,” Tarquin said, still steadily. But as always, even as he asserted this, he wondered if it was true. It was certainly true that he and Quentin had despised their scrawny, deceitful, cunning cousin, but they had both tried to hide their contempt when Lucien had come to live among them, and then, when Tarquin had become his guardian, they had both tried to exert a benign influence on the twisted character. Tried and most signally failed.

For a moment he met his cousin’s eyes, and the truth of their relationship lay bare and barren for both of them. Then he said with cold deliberation, “Get out of my house, Edgecombe, and stay out of my sight. I wash my hands of you from this moment.”

Lucien’s mouth twisted in a sly smile. “And how will that look? Husband and wife living apart after a few days of marital bliss?”

“I don’t give a damn how it will look. I don’t want you breathing the same air as Juliana.” Tarquin turned contemptuously.

“I’ll repudiate her,” Lucien wheezed. “I’ll divorce her for a harlot.”

Tarquin turned back very slowly. “You aren’t good enough to clean her boots,” he said with soft emphasis. “And I warn you now, Edgecombe, you say one word against Juliana, in public or in private, and I will send you to your premature grave, even faster than you can do yourself.” His eyes scorched this truth into his cousin’s ghastly countenance. Then he swung on his heel and stalked away.

“You’ll regret this, Redmayne. Believe me, you’ll regret it.” But the promise was barely whispered and the duke didn’t hear. Lucien stared after him with fear and loathing. Then he dragged himself down the passage to his own apartments, soothing his mortified soul with the promise of revenge.

L
ucien emerged at twilight from Mistress Jenkins’s Elysium in Covent Garden. He bore the well-satisfied air of a man who has relieved both mind and body. Jenkins’s flogging house was a highly satisfactory outlet for anger and frustration. The Posture Molls knew exactly how to accommodate a man, whichever side of the birch he chose to be, and he had given free rein to his need to punish someone for the humiliation of his debacle with his wife and Tarquin’s subsequent edict.

His eyes carried a brutal glint, and his mouth had a cruel twist to it as he strolled up Russell Street and into the square. But it didn’t take long for the reality of his situation to return. He’d been thrown out of his cousin’s house, cut off from that bottomless and ever-open purse. And he had a cursed woman to blame fer it.

He entered the Shakespeare’s Head, ignored the greetings of acquaintances, and sat down in morose silence at a corner table, isolated from the company. He was well into his second tankard of blue ruin when he became aware of a pair of eyes fixed intently upon him from a table in the window. Lucien glared across the smoke-hazed taproom; then his bleary gaze focused. He recognized the overweight man looking as if he was dressed up to ape his betters,
squashed into the clothes of a fashionable man-about-town, his highly colored face already suffused with drink. As Lucien returned the stare, the man wiped a sheen of grease from his chin with his sleeve and pushed back his chair.

He made his ponderous and unsteady way through the crowded tables and arrived in Lucien’s corner. “Beggin’ your pardon, my lord, but I happened to be here last even when you were selling your wife,” George began, as intimidated by the death’s-head stare and the man’s sickly, greenish pallor as he was by the depthless malice in the sunken eyes.

“I remember,” Lucien said grudgingly. “Five hundred pounds you offered for her. Fancied her, did you?”

“Is she truly your wife, sir?” George couldn’t disguise the urgency of his question, and Lucien’s eyes sharpened.

He buried his nose in his tankard before saying, “What’s it to you, may I ask?”

George started to pull back a chair, but the viscount’s expression forbade it. He remained standing awkwardly. “I believe I know her,” he said.

“Oh, I should think you and half London knew her,” Lucien responded with a shrug. “She came from a whorehouse, after all.”

“I thought so.” George’s flush deepened with excitement. “She’s not truly your wife, then. A Fleet marriage, perhaps?”

“No such luck.” Lucien laughed unpleasantly. “I assure you she’s Lady Edgecombe all right and tight. My cursed cousin made sure of that. A plague on him!” He took up his tankard again.

George was nonplussed. His disappointment at hearing that Juliana was legally wed was so great that for a moment he could think of nothing to say. He’d convinced himself that she couldn’t possibly be what she seemed, and now all his plans came crashing around his ears like the proverbial house of cards.

“So why are you so interested in the whore?” Lucien demanded.

George licked his dry lips. “She murdered my father.”

“Oh, did she now?” Lucien sat up, his eyes suddenly alive. “Well, that doesn’t surprise me. She half killed me this afternoon. If I had my way, I’d put a scold’s bridle on her, strap her in the ducking chair, and drown her!”

George nodded, his little eyes glittering. “She’s a murderess. I won’t rest until I see her burn.”

“Take a seat, dear fellow.” Lucien gestured to the chair and bellowed at a potboy, “A bottle of burgundy here, you idle lout!” He leaned back in his chair and surveyed George thoughtfully. “It seems we have a desire in common. Tell me all about my dear wife’s sordid history.”

George leaned forward, dropping his voice confidentially. Lucien listened to the tale, his expression unmoving, drinking his way steadily through the bottle, for the most part forgetting to refill the other man’s glass. He had no difficulty reading the lust behind Ridge’s desire for vengeance, and he knew it could be put to good use. The man was a country-bred oaf, with no subtlety. But when the twin devils of lust and vengeance drove a man, he could be an invincible enemy under proper direction. A most valuable tool.

If Lucien could expose Juliana, could see her quivering in the dock to receive the death sentence, Tarquin’s disgrace would be almost as devastating as the girl’s. His damnable pride would crumble in the dust. He’d be the jesting stock of London.

George finished the story and drained his glass. “I thought I would tell the duke first,” he said, looking mournfully at the empty bottle. “Expose Juliana to him and see what he says.”

Lucien shook his head. “Depend upon it, he knows it all.”

George pointedly picked up the empty bottle and upended it into his glass. “How can you be sure?”

“Because he as good as told me.” Lucien finally beckoned the potboy for another bottle. “Told me the harlot would do his bidding. Thought then he must have something
on her. Something to hold over her.” His voice was becoming increasingly slurred, but the spite in his eyes grew more pronounced.

“If I laid a charge against her,” George said eagerly, “if I did that, she’d have to answer it, even if she denied that she was who she was. But if I could get her guardians to identify her as well as myself, well, surely that should convince the magistrates.”

Lucien looked doubtful. “Problem is, Tarquin’s up to every trick. A man has to be sharp as a needle and slippery as an eel to put one over on him.”

“But even the duke couldn’t withstand the testimony of Juliana’s guardians. She lived with them from the time she was four years old. If they swear and I swear to her identity, surely that would be enough.”

“It might. So long as Tarquin didn’t get wind of it first.” Lucien stared into his glass, swirling the rich red contents. “It might be easier to work on the whore herself.”

“Kidnap her, you mean.” George’s eyes glittered. “I’ve been thinkin’ along those lines myself. I’d soon get a confession out of her.”

George stared into the middle distance. Only when he had Juliana in his hands would he be able to satisfy this all-consuming hunger. Then he would be at peace, able to reclaim his rightful inheritance. He was no longer interested in having her to wife. But he knew he would get no rest until he’d indulged this craving that gnawed at his vitals like Prometheus’s vultures.

Lucien’s mouth moved in a derisive, flickering smile. He could read the man’s thoughts as if they were spelled out. Slobbering, incontinent bumpkin … couldn’t wait to possess that repellently voluptuous body. “I think we should attempt the legitimate route first,” he said solemnly, enjoying the clear disappointment in his companion’s fallen face. “Lay a charge against her with the support of her guardians. If that doesn’t work, then …” He shrugged. “We’ll see.”

George traced a dark, rusty stain in the table’s planking
with a splayed fingertip. Red wine or blood, it could be either in this place. The realization entered his befuddled brain that if Juliana was in prison, guards could be bribed. He could have her to himself for as long as it would take. Either plan would give him the opportunity he craved.

He looked up and nodded. “I’ll go back to Hampshire in the morning. Lay the matter before the Forsetts. Where will I find you, my lord?”

Lucien scowled, remembering anew that he was now condemned to lodge under his own besieged and uncomfortable roof. “My house is on Mount Street, but here’s as good a place as any other. Leave a message with Gideon.” He gestured with his head toward the man filling pitchers of ale at the bar counter before taking up his glass again, partially turning his shoulder to George in a gesture that the other man correctly interpreted as dismissal.

George pushed back his chair and stood up. He hesitated over words of farewell. It seemed too inconclusive simply to walk away, but there was no encouragement from the viscount. “I bid you good night, sir,” he said finally, receiving not so much as a grunt of acknowledgment. He walked away, intending to return to his previous bench, but he was filled with a restless energy, a surge of elation at the thought that he was no longer alone in his quest. He went outside instead. A slatternly young woman approached him with a near toothless smile.

“Haifa guinea, honorable sir?” She thrust her bosom at him, her black eyes snapping.

“Five shillings,” he returned.

She shrugged, took his hand, and led him off to the bulks beneath the market holders’ stalls. For five shillings, it wasn’t worth taking him to her room on King Street, where she’d have to pay for candles and probably change the linen.

“The Bedford Head on Wednesday forenoon.”

The word flew around the houses of Covent Garden,
dropping in the ears of languid women gathered in parlors in the morning’s dishabille, idly comparing notes of their previous night’s labors, sipping coffee, discussing fashions in the latest periodicals. The word was brought by women from Mistress Dennison’s establishment. It was whispered to heads bent in an attentive circle and received with hushed curiosity. The words
sisterhood
and
solidarity
were spoken on tongues stumbling over the unfamiliar concepts. And the Russell Street women went on to the next house, leaving the seed to germinate, with Lucy’s former plight as fertilizer.