Paris—March 1828
“No. It can’t be,” Sir Bertram Trent whispered, aghast. His round blue eyes bulging in horror, he pressed his forehead to the window overlooking the Rue de Provence.
“I believe it is, sir,” said his manservant, Withers.
Sir Bertram dragged his hand through his tousled brown curls. It was two o’clock in the afternoon and he’d only just changed out of his dressing gown. “Genevieve,” he said hollowly. “Oh, Lord, it is her.”
“It is your grandmother, Lady Pembury, beyond doubt—and your sister, Miss Jessica, with her.” Withers suppressed a smile. He was suppressing a great deal at the moment. The mad urge to dance about the room, shouting hallelujah, for instance.
They were saved, he thought. With Miss Jessica here, matters would soon be put right. He had taken a great risk in writing to her, but it had to be done, for the good of the family.
Sir Bertram had fallen among Evil Companions. The evilest of companions in all of Christendom, in Withers’ opinion: a pack of wastrel degenerates led by that monster, the fourth Marquess of Dain.
But Miss Jessica would soon put a stop to it, the elderly manservant assured himself as he speedily knotted his master’s neckcloth.
Sir Bertram’s twenty-seven-year-old sister had inherited her widowed grandmother’s alluring looks: the silken hair nearly blue-black in color, almond-shaped silver-grey eyes, alabaster complexion, and graceful figure—all of which, in Lady Pembury’s case, had proved immune to the ravages of time.
More important, in the practical Withers’ view, Miss Jessica had inherited her late father’s brains, physical agility, and courage. She could ride, fence, and shoot with the best of them. Actually, when it came to pistols, she was the best of the whole family, and that was saying something. During two brief marriages, her grandmother had borne four sons by her first husband, Sir Edmund Trent, and two by her second, Viscount Pembury, and daughters and sons alike had bred males in abundance. Yet not a one of those fine fellows could outshoot Miss Jessica. She could pop the cork off a wine bottle at twenty paces—and Withers himself had seen her do it.
He wouldn’t mind seeing her pop Lord Dain’s cork for him. The great brute was an abomination, a disgrace to his country, an idle reprobate with no more conscience than a dung beetle. He had lured Sir Bertram—who, lamentably, was not the cleverest of gentlemen—into his nefarious circle and down the slippery slope to ruin. Another few months of Lord Dain’s company and Sir Bertram would be bankrupt—if the endless round of debauchery didn’t kill him first.
But there wouldn’t be another few months, Withers reflected happily as he nudged his reluctant master to the door. Miss Jessica would fix everything. She always did.
Bertie had managed a show of surprised delight to see his sister and grandmother. The instant the latter had retired to her bedchamber to rest from the journey, however, he yanked Jessica into what seemed to be the drawing room of the narrow—and much too expensive, she reflected irritably—appartement.
“Devil take it, Jess, what’s this about?” he demanded.
Jessica picked up the mass of sporting papers heaped upon an overstuffed chair by the fire, threw them onto the grate, and sank down with a sigh into the cushioned softness.
The carriage ride from Calais had been long, dusty, and bumpy. She had little doubt that, thanks to the abominable condition of French roads, her bottom was black and blue.
She would very much like to bruise her brother’s bottom for him at present. Unfortunately, though two years younger, he was a head taller than she, and several stone heavier. The days of bringing him to his senses via a sturdy birch rod were long past.
“It’s a birthday present,” she said.
His unhealthily pale countenance brightened for a moment, and his familiar, amiably stupid grin appeared. “I say, Jess, that’s awful sweet of—” Then the grin faded and his brow furrowed. “But my birthday ain’t until July. You can’t be meaning to stay until—”
“I meant Genevieve’s birthday,” she said.
One of Lady Pembury’s several eccentricities was her insistence that her children and grandchildren address and refer to her by name. “I am a woman,” she would say to those who protested that such terminology was disrespectful. “I have a name. Mama, Grandmama…” Here she would give a delicate shudder. “So anonymous.”
Bertie’s expression grew wary. “When’s that?”
“Her birthday, as you ought to remember, is the day after tomorrow.” Jessica pulled off her grey kid boots, drew the footstool closer, and put her feet up. “I wanted her to have a treat. She hasn’t been to Paris in ages, and matters haven’t been pleasant at home. Some of the aunts have been muttering about having her locked up in a lunatic asylum. Not that I’m surprised. They’ve never understood her. Did you know, she had three marriage offers last month alone? I believe Number Three was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Lord Fangiers is four and thirty years old. The family says it’s embarrassing.”
“Well, it ain’t exactly dignified, at her age.”
“She’s not dead, Bertie. I don’t see why she should behave as though she were. If she wishes to wed a pot boy, that’s her business.” Jessica gave her brother a searching look. “Of course, it would mean that her new husband would have charge of her funds. I daresay that worries everybody.”
Bertie flushed. “No need to look at me that way.”
“Isn’t there? You appear rather worried yourself. Maybe you had an idea she’d bail you out of your difficulties.”
He tugged at his cravat. “Ain’t in difficulties.”
“Oh, then I must be the one. According to your man of business, paying your present debts will leave me with precisely forty-seven pounds, six shillings, threepence for the remainder of the year. Which means I must either move in with aunts and uncles again or work. I spent ten years as unpaid nanny to their brats. I do not intend to spend another ten seconds. That leaves work.”
His pale blue eyes widened. “Work? You mean, earn wages?”
She nodded. “I see no acceptable alternative.”
“Have you gone loony, Jess? You’re a girl. You get shackled. To a chap who’s plump in the pocket. Like Genevieve done. Twice. You got her looks, you know. If you wasn’t so confounded picky—”
“But I am,” she said. “Fortunately, I can afford to be.”
She and Bertie had been orphaned very young, and left to the care of aunts, uncles, and cousins barely able to support their own burgeoning broods. The family might have been comfortably well off if there hadn’t been so very many of them. But Genevieve descended from a line of prolific breeders, especially of males, and her offspring had inherited the talent.
That was one of the reasons Jessica received so many marriage offers—an average of six per annum, even at present, when she ought to be on the shelf, wearing a spinster’s cap. But she’d be hanged before she’d marry and play brood mare to a rich, titled oaf—or before she’d don dowdy caps, for that matter.
She had a talent for unearthing treasures at auctions and secondhand shops, and selling same at a tidy profit. Though she wasn’t making a fortune, for the last five years she had been able to buy her own fashionable clothes and accessories, instead of wearing her relatives’ castoffs. It was a modest form of independence. She wanted more. During the past year, she had been planning how to get more.
She had finally saved enough to lease and begin stocking a shop of her own. It would be elegant and very exclusive, catering to an elite clientele. In her many hours at Society affairs, she’d developed a keen understanding of the idle rich, not only of what they liked but also of the most effective methods of drawing them in.
She meant to start drawing them in once she’d hauled her brother out of the mess he’d got himself into. Then she’d see to it that his mistakes never again disrupted her well-ordered life. Bertie was an irresponsible, unreliable, rattlebrained ninny. She shuddered to imagine what the future held for her if she continued to depend upon him for anything.
“You know very well I don’t need to marry for money,” she told him now. “All I need do is open the shop. I’ve selected the place and I’ve saved enough to—”
“That cork-brained rag-and-bottle-shop scheme?” he cried.
“Not a rag and bottle shop,” she said calmly. “As I’ve explained to you at least a dozen times—”
“I won’t let you set up as a shopkeeper.” Bertie drew himself up. “No sister of mine will go into trade.”
“I should like to see you stop me,” she said.
He screwed up his face into a threatening scowl.
She leaned back in the chair and gazed at him contemplatively. “Lud, Bertie, you look just like a pig, with your eyes all squeezed up like that. In fact, you’ve grown amazingly piglike since last I saw you. You’ve gained two stone at least. Maybe as much as three.” Her gaze dropped. “And all in your belly, by the looks of it. You put me in mind of the king.”
“That whale?” he shrieked. “I do not. Take it back, Jess.”
“Or what? You’ll sit on me?” She laughed.
He stalked away and flung himself onto the sofa.
“If I were you,” she said, “I’d worry less about what my sister said and did, and more about my own future. I can take care of myself, Bertie. But you…Well, I believe you’re the one who ought to be thinking about marrying somebody plump in the pocket.”
“Marriage is for cowards, fools, and women,” he said.
She smiled. “That sounds like the sort of thing some drunken jackass would announce—just before falling into the punch bowl—to a crowd of his fellow drunken jackasses, amid the usual masculine witticisms about fornication and excretory processes.”
She didn’t wait for Bertie to sort through his mind for definitions of the big words. “I know what men find hilarious,” she said. “I’ve lived with you and reared ten male cousins. Drunk or sober, they like jokes about what they do—or want to do—with females, and they are endlessly fascinated with passing wind, water, and—”
“Women don’t have a sense of humor,” Bertie said. “They don’t need one. The Almighty made them as a permanent joke on men. From which one may logically deduce that the Almighty is a female.”
He uttered the words slowly and carefully, as though he’d taken considerable pains to memorize them.
“Whence arises this philosophical profundity, Bertie?” she asked.
“Say again?”
“Who told you that?”
“It wasn’t a drunken jackass, Miss Sneering and Snide,” he said smugly. “I may not have the biggest brain box in the world, but I guess I know a jackass when I see one, and Dain ain’t.”
“Indeed not. He sounds a clever fellow. What else does he have to say, dear?”
There was a long pause while Bertie tried to decide whether or not she was being sarcastic. As usual, he decided wrong.
“Well, he is clever, Jess. I should have realized you’d recognize it. The things he says—why, that brain of his is always working, a mile a minute. Don’t know what he fuels it with. Don’t eat a lot of fish, you know, so it can’t be that.”
“I collect he fuels it with gin,” Jessica muttered.
“Say again?”
“I said, ‘I reckon his brain’s like a steam engine.’”
“Must be,” said Bertie. “And not just for talking, either. He’s got the money sort of brains, too. Plays the ’Change like it was a fiddle, the fellows say. Only the music Dain makes come out is the ‘chink, chink, chink’ of sovereigns. And that’s a lot of chinks, Jess.”
She had no doubt of that. By all accounts, the Marquess of Dain was one of England’s wealthiest men. He could well afford reckless extravagance. And poor Bertie, who couldn’t afford even modest extravagance, was bent on imitating his idol.
For idolatry it surely was, as Withers had claimed in his barely coherent letter. That Bertie had exerted his limited faculties so far as to actually memorize what Dain said was incontrovertible proof that Withers hadn’t exaggerated.
Lord Dain had become the lord of Bertie’s universe…and he was leading him straight to Hell.
Lord Dain did not look up when the shop bell tinkled. He did not care who the new customer might be, and Champtois, purveyor of antiques and artistic curiosities, could not possibly care, because the most important customer in Paris had already entered his shop. Being the most important, Dain expected and received the shopkeeper’s exclusive attention. Champtois not only did not glance toward the door, but gave no sign of seeing, hearing, or thinking anything unrelated to the Marquess of Dain.
Indifference, unfortunately, is not the same as deafness. The bell had no sooner ceased tinkling than Dain heard a familiar male voice muttering in English accents, and an unfamiliar, feminine one murmuring in response. He could not make out the words. For once, Bertie Trent managed to keep his voice below the alleged “whisper” that could be heard across a football field.
Still, it was Bertie Trent, the greatest nitwit in the Northern Hemisphere, which meant that Lord Dain must postpone his own transaction. He had no intention of conducting a bargaining session while Trent was by, saying, doing, and looking everything calculated to drive the price up while under the delirious delusion he was shrewdly helping to drive it down.
“I say,” came the rugby-field voice. “Isn’t that—Well, by Jupiter, it is.”
Thud. Thud. Thud. Heavy approaching footsteps.
Lord Dain suppressed a sigh, turned, and directed a hard stare at his accoster.
Trent stopped short. “That is to say, don’t mean to interrupt, I’m sure, especially when a chap’s dickering with Champtois,” he said, jerking his head in the proprietor’s direction. “Like I was telling Jess a moment ago, a cove’s got to keep his wits about him and mind he don’t offer more than half what he’s willing to pay. Not to mention keeping track of what’s ‘half’ and what’s ‘twice’ when it’s all in confounded francs and sous and what you call ’em other gibberishy coins and multiplying and dividing again to tally it up in proper pounds, shillings, and pence—which I don’t know why they don’t do it proper in the first place except maybe to aggravate a fellow.”
“I believe I’ve remarked before, Trent, that you might experience less aggravation if you did not upset the balance of your delicate constitution by attempting to count,” said Dain.
He heard a rustle of movement and a muffled sound somewhere ahead and to his left. His gaze shifted thither. The female whose murmurs he’d heard was bent over a display case of jewelry. The shop was exceedingly ill lit—on purpose, to increase customers’ difficulty in properly evaluating what they were looking at. All Dain could ascertain was that the female wore a blue overgarment of some sort and one of the hideously overdecorated bonnets currently in fashion.
“I particularly recommend,” he went on, his eyes upon the female, “that you resist the temptation to count if you are contemplating a gift for your chère amie. Women deal in a higher mathematical realm than men, especially when it comes to gifts.”
“That, Bertie, is a consequence of the feminine brain having reached a more advanced state of development,” said the female without looking up. “She recognizes that the selection of a gift requires the balancing of a profoundly complicated moral, psychological, aesthetic, and sentimental equation. I should not recommend that a mere male attempt to involve himself in the delicate process of balancing it, especially by the primitive method of counting.”
For one unsettling moment, it seemed to Lord Dain that someone had just shoved his head into a privy. His heart began to pound, and his skin broke out in clammy gooseflesh, much as it had on one unforgettable day at Eton five and twenty years ago.
He told himself that his breakfast had not agreed with him. The butter must have been rancid.
It was utterly unthinkable that the contemptuous feminine retort had overset him. He could not possibly be disconcerted by the discovery that this sharp-tongued female was not, as he’d assumed, a trollop Bertie had attached himself to the previous night.
Her accents proclaimed her a lady. Worse—if there could be a worse species of humanity—she was, by the sounds of it, a bluestocking. Lord Dain had never before in his life met a female who’d even heard of an equation, let alone was aware that one balanced them.
Bertie approached, and in his playing-field confidential whisper asked, “Any idea what she said, Dain?”
“Yes.”
“What was it?”
“Men are ignorant brutes.”
“You sure?”
“Quite.”
Bertie let out a sigh and turned to the female, who still appeared fascinated with the contents of the display case. “You promised you wouldn’t insult my friends, Jess.”
“I don’t see how I could, when I haven’t met any.”
She seemed to be fixed on something. The beribboned and beflowered bonnet tilted this way and that as she studied the object of her interest from various angles.
“Well, do you want to meet one?” Trent asked impatiently. “Or do you mean to stand there gaping at that rubbish all day?”
She straightened, but did not turn around.
Bertie cleared his throat. “Jessica,” he said determinedly, “Dain. Dain—Drat you, Jess, can’t you take your eyes off that trash for one minute?”
She turned.
“Dain—m’sister.”
She looked up.
And a swift, fierce heat swept Lord Dain from the crown of his head to the toes in his champagne-buffed boots. The heat was immediately succeeded by a cold sweat.
“My lord,” she said with a curt nod.
“Miss Trent,” he said. Then he could not for the life of him produce another syllable.
Under the monstrous bonnet was a perfect oval of a porcelain white, flawless countenance. Thick, sooty lashes framed silver-grey eyes with an upward slant that neatly harmonized with the slant of her high cheekbones. Her nose was straight and delicately slender, her mouth soft and pink and just a fraction overfull.
She was not classic English perfection, but she was some sort of perfection and, being neither blind nor ignorant, Lord Dain generally recognized quality when he saw it.
If she had been a piece of Sevres china or an oil painting or a tapestry, he would have bought her on the spot and not quibbled about the price.
For one deranged instant, while he contemplated licking her from the top of her alabaster brow to the tips of her dainty toes, he wondered what her price was.
But out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed his reflection in the glass.
His dark face was harsh and hard, the face of Beelzebub himself. In Dain’s case, the book could be judged accurately by the cover, for he was dark and hard inside as well. His was a Dartmoor soul, where the wind blew fierce and the rain beat down upon grim, grey rocks, and where the pretty green patches of ground turned out to be mires that could suck down an ox.
Anyone with half a brain could see the signs posted: “ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE” or, more to the point, “DANGER. QUICKSAND”
Equally to the point, the creature before him was a lady, and no signs had to be posted about her to warn him off. Ladies, in his dictionary, were listed under Plague, Pestilence, and Famine.
With the return of reason, Dain discovered that he must have been staring coldly at her for rather a while, because Bertie—bored, evidently—had turned away to study a set of wooden soldiers.
Dain promptly collected his wits. “Was it not your turn to speak, Miss Trent?” he asked in mocking tones. “Were you not about to make a comment on the weather? I believe that’s considered the proper—that is, safe—way to commence a conversation.”
“Your eyes,” she said, her gaze perfectly steady, “are very black. Intellect tells me they must be merely a very dark brown. Yet the illusion is…overpowering.”
There was a quick, stabbing sensation in the environs of his diaphragm, or his belly, he couldn’t tell.
His composure faltered not a whit. He had learned composure in hard school.
“The conversation has progressed with astonishing rapidity to the personal,” he drawled. “You are fascinated by my eyes.”
“I can’t help it,” she said. “They are extraordinary. So very black. But I do not wish to make you uncomfortable.”
With a very faint smile, she turned back to the jewelry case.
Dain wasn’t certain what exactly was wrong with her, but he had no doubt something was. He was Lord Beelzebub, wasn’t he? She was supposed to faint, or recoil in horrified revulsion at the very least. Yet she had gazed at him as bold as brass, and it had seemed for a moment as though the creature were actually flirting with him.
He decided to leave. He could just as well wrestle with this incongruity out of doors. He was heading for the door when Bertie turned and hurried after him.
“You got off easy,” Trent whispered, loud enough to be heard at Notre Dame. “I was sure she’d rip into you—and she will rip if she’s a mind to, and don’t care who it is, either. Not but what you could handle her, but she does give a fellow a headache, and if you was thinking of going for a drink—”
“Champtois has just come into possession of an automaton you will find intriguing,” Dain told him. “Why don’t you ask him to wind it up so that you can watch it perform?”
Bertie’s square face lit with delight. “One of them what-you-call-’ems? Truly? What does it do?”
“Why don’t you go look?” Dain suggested.
Bertie trotted off to the shopkeeper and promptly commenced babbling in accents any right-thinking Parisian would have considered grounds for homicide.
Having distracted Bertie from his apparent intention of following him, Lord Dain had only to take another few steps to be out the door. But his gaze drifted to Miss Trent, who was again entranced with something in the jewel case, and eaten by curiosity, he hesitated.