She had accused him, not without cause, of appraising people like commodities, but it required a deliberate and sustained effort to view her so cold-bloodedly. She would never convince anybody of being a professional courtesan: he was certain of that. Laughter lifted her long face from merely pretty to beautiful, but her blushes came too readily. No one would believe she had professional experience in lovemaking.
Still, she had unexpected talents, and a very unexpected ability to enjoy a masquerade. A bohemian artist . . . he thought she might manage that pretense for a weekend.
He was still undecided when they left the café shortly before dawn. Barrington had offered a ride, which they declined. Gwen floated out ahead of him. She was in the grip of some dreamy silence, but as he helped her into the cab, she leaned back out and spoke abruptly. “You haven’t told me what you thought of my performance.”
“Perhaps you can guess.”
“No,” she said. “You must tell me.”
He smiled a little. “Or what? You won’t let me inside?”
She stared at him, unspeaking, and some quality in her silence lent the moment an uncanny flavor. While the darkness of the interior concealed her body, the streetlight behind them illuminated the pale oval of her face, gilding her cheeks in shades of amber and ghostly blue. The effect was . . . arresting. Vermeer had used natural light to paint women in this way, faces emerging from the shadows, forcing the viewer’s eye to focus on what was most important: the look of grace. The mouth firmed in determination. The eyes poised to behold a revelation.
But God knew Gwen was waiting in vain if she looked to him for it. And surely she knew that, too. He rubbed his hand over his chest, which felt strangely tight, no doubt from the smoky air inside. “Didn’t get your fill of praise inside, then?”
Her unabashed laugh broke apart the weird mood. “Never,” she said.
“Well, at least you’ve mastered immodesty.” He smiled and unbent. “I would say the Barbary Coast chose well.”
In response, she flushed and sat back into the vehicle.
A few blocks from her hotel, Alex stopped the driver so they could walk the rest of the way. He wanted to make sure Barrington was not following them; it would not do to have the man discover her identity. “Fresh air,” he said as he helped her down to the quay. “Even in this stench, there’s a bit of it.”
As they strolled beneath the elms that lined the embankment of the river, she drew a long, testing breath. “I rather like the smell,” she said as she took his arm. “Somebody’s burning . . . dung, I believe? It reminds me of the countryside.”
“And that’s a good thing?”
She gave him a peering, incredulous look. “You dislike the country?”
“I’m not particularly fond of it.”
“But whyever not? You spend the holidays there—and I know you grew up at Weston Hall. That’s a beautiful estate.”
He paused. “No doubt it is. But the countryside tends to make me feel . . .” As if I’m suffocating, he thought. “Bored,” he said instead. “Cities are full of life. Ambition.” It was to the city men went when inspired by the possibility for change. Conversely, the very appeal of the country, so far as he could gather, rested on ideas of staidness, stability, stagnancy. It came close to his idea of a prison, did English country life—rotting quietly in the middle of nowhere, dining every evening before the same view that he would see from his deathbed, amidst company that had known him from the day he was born.
As a boy, of course, he’d been told that he would be lucky to enjoy such a fate.
“I find the country a very lazy cousin to the city,” he continued. “Can you disagree? Had the viscount not come to Paris—had he gone instead to . . . Suffolk, say—would you have managed to have such an adventure tonight?”
“Of course not.” She made a thoughtful pause. “I suppose you’re right. My home is in the country, you know. But I never thought to go there.”
“Your home? Do you mean Heaton Dale?”
“Of course,” she said in surprise. “Where else?”
He hadn’t realized that she thought of that place as home. It was a monstrous, Palladian palace, the construction of which had become the subject of great mockery amongst his mother’s friends fifteen years ago. Some arriviste’s attempt at a bourgeois Buckingham, his mother had called it. I wonder if Mr. Maudsley plans to cast his own crown?
“Do you spend much time there?” The place, as far as he knew, had stood empty since her parents’ death. Certainly Richard hadn’t lived there. He’d mocked its pretensions more viciously than anyone else had.
“Oh, occasionally I spend a day or two. Never long, but I had hoped—well.” Gwen pulled a face. “I’ve just redesigned the gardens. Trent adored Tudor mazes, but Thomas preferred the Chinese style. Heavens, I pulled up the entire back lawn for that boor!”
Ah. “You’d planned to live there, after marriage.”
“Where else?” She gave a light laugh. “It wasn’t as if my fiancés—either of them—had a better option to offer. Odd, isn’t it? Both gentlemen had a dozen houses to their names, but not a single one fit to inhabit.”
“Hmm. May I suggest, Gwen, that when you next undertake to marry—”
“Oh, please, let’s not even speak of it.”
“—that you make a requirement,” he finished. “Consider nobody who cannot claim at least one roof without holes.”
“A good policy, I suppose.” She gave her head a little shake. “But why are we even speaking of such matters? We’re in Paris, of all places! Paris at sunrise! I’d be terribly greedy to be dreaming about the country when surrounded by this!” She swept out her hands, then did a little twirl down the pavement.
The twirl looked like manufactured good cheer—her first placating routine of the evening, in fact. Almost, he made a sarcastic remark. Paris, for all its charms, was one of the filthier cities of the world. And sunrise was no large wonder: he could testify, firsthand, that it happened every morning.
But then her face did light up, as though the act had become real, and, caught off guard as he was, he felt his damned bloody heart trip; he was grateful that her attention no longer fixed upon him, for he had no idea what she would have seen in his face, had she looked.
Instead, she gazed past him, then around them, turning a slower circle, head tipping in scrutiny. She was admiring the sleeping street, he supposed, the darkened windows in the stony faces of the Gothic and medieval facades—and the bits of trash fluttering along the embankment. Fair enough, they did tangle with some very pretty early wildflowers sprouting through the cracks in the pavement. Rogue flowers. The saffron petals formed a colorful, illicit trail up the walk as far as the eye could see, until one’s attention was hijacked by the tower of Notre Dame, demanding the eye follow it upward to the heavens. The night sky was ripening into peach on the eastern horizon, promising a day of warmth ahead. On the Seine, the glow of the rising sun spread in ripples of gold.
A lilac petal was drifting past him. On impulse, he reached out to catch it. “Yes,” he murmured. “I suppose it is beautiful.”
She turned back, mouth quirked. “Alex, you do not even have to suppose. I will vouch for it—or bribe you to believe it, if you prefer. I do not hesitate to do such things now, you know; I have grown thoroughly wicked in the night.”
He laughed. “God help us,” he said, and tossed the petal at her. “Wicked becomes you a bit too well, Miss Maudsley.”
She laughed back and batted the petal away. “And there’s the pot calling the kettle black!” she said before slapping her hand over a jaw-cracking yawn. When her hand dropped, her expression grew serious. She looked again toward the tower of Notre Dame. “It’s not really so wicked, though, is it? To want to live like this?”
“Like this?” he echoed.
“To want to live . . . freely,” she said. “Even as a woman.”
There was a vulnerable note in her voice, longing entwined with the faintest note of fear. She turned her face to him, then, and he saw the hope there, written in her eyes.
She should not trust him with such sights. It would be so easy to crush her now—to laugh at her and say, You think what you’ve done is wicked? It was child’s play, sweetheart. This is not freedom. This is simply the sort of lark available to a woman with three million pounds.
He opened his mouth, then closed it.
He would not speak the words to her. It would make him a hypocrite of the lowest order. For all the ways he could pick apart her phrasing, he did know what she meant. What she was feeling . . . it was the same yearning that had driven him away from England the very moment that university had concluded. His first sunrise over the Atlantic, the sea spray in his face, he’d leaned so far over the rail into the wind that a passing sailor had cried out in alarm.
How odd. He’d forgotten that exhilaration. How long since he’d last felt it? Its diminishment had probably been inevitable. In those early years, he’d boarded ships for sheer curiosity about the destination. Now he looked at a map and saw no names unfamiliar to him. His travels had become a matter of routine and obligation.
The sticky strands of fatigue seemed to twine together and constrict around his brain. He set his teeth against a profound tug of exhaustion. Think. Answer her.
But his sluggish mind was still stuck on the other matter. How had he come to the point where a week in Paris struck him as nothing more than an irritating delay between various and equally irritating business commitments?
He had a brief flash of a hamster on a wheel. A caged hamster. A hamster in a cage. Round and round and round it ran.
“Won’t you answer me?” she asked softly.
He took a long breath. “My apologies. I’m . . . a bit tired. Is it wicked to live like this . . .”
Would it be so wicked if the next time she touched him, he did not stop her?
He cleared his throat. “I suppose the answer depends on whom you ask.”
Her eyes were clear and steady. “I am asking you.”
“Then here’s a lesson for you,” he said. He looked toward the sunrise. “The only person to ask is yourself.”
By the time Gwen woke, sunlight had conquered the molded ceiling. It put the time at well past noon. The smell of eggs seeped inside from the sitting room, growing steadily stronger, as if they’d started to rot.
She had a fuzzy memory of Elma shaking her awake for breakfast and saying, “We have an appointment at Laferrière at ten o’clock, dear. Why on earth are you still abed?”
Oh, no. Gwen pushed herself upright against the headboard, recalling the full extent of it now.
Thanks to her grogginess, she’d not thought to lie to Elma about what had happened last night. Elma had been furious. For the first time in Gwen’s memory, she had lifted her voice. Gwen could not recall the full extent of the lecture, only that it had touched on hoydens, irresponsible bounders who encouraged them, and the horrors of rabble-rousing more generally.
She also recalled the crack of the door as Elma had slammed out of the suite.
She clamped a hand over her eyes. She should apologize, of course. She did not think she could bear having Elma angry with her.
But it would be a lie if she said she regretted a single thing about last night. Even falling asleep to the sunrise had seemed romantic! Cozy beneath the covers, she’d fought to keep her eyes open as long as possible, concentrating on the singing feeling inside her, the wild giddy thrill of everything that had happened. Remember this, she had thought. That I can feel this way! So light and unworried. I never knew it before.
A knock came at the door. Michaels, her lady’s maid, poked her head into the room. “Mail and the newspaper, miss.”
The number of letters surprised her. She flipped through them as the door closed. One from Caroline, who probably wanted expatriate gossip. Another from Belinda, who had been entertaining her by proposing ever more novel forms of persecution for Thomas. Lady Anne had sent a note; her daily condolences were beginning to smack of schadenfreude. The Earl of Whitson paid me particular attention at the Flintons’ ball last night, she wrote. Everyone says I am likely to wed before the end of the season. Of course, my only regret would be your inability to attend.
What a clever way to be disinvited from one’s bridesmaid’s future, imaginary wedding!
The fourth letter bore an unfamiliar, starkly angular penmanship. When she opened it, she discovered it was from Alex.
Her heart skipped a beat. He had thrown a petal at her this morning, on the banks of the Seine, and when he’d laughed, the sound had stolen her breath. In the golden light of early morning, he had looked impossibly handsome. But also younger—friendlier, somehow—and more playful, too. He had looked, in short, like somebody who might be speaking to her as an equal.
She had not wanted the night to end. She had wanted to keep walking with him along the river. He’d been as much a part of her intoxication as the wine she’d drunk at Le Chat Noir.
Gwen, he had written, I hope this letter finds you in no lower spirits than did the sunrise. I write to you in lieu of a call because of a pressing appointment with the Peruvian ambassador. However, the contents of this note are no doubt too indelicate to be safely committed to paper, so I hope you will recognize the trust I place in you by committing them to ink. I ask you to destroy the letter after reading it.
In short, I have a proposition for you. But first, it will require an explanation of my main cause for visiting Paris . . .
By the time she’d finished the letter and cast it into the fire, she was a-thrill again with all the excitement of the evening before. What a wicked and marvelous plan he proposed! And to think that he would ask her, of all people, to help him!
But why not? He needed her help. What a novel and remarkable idea! He needed her. He would never have won that invitation by himself, and he could not go to Barrington’s country home without her.
She wrote her reply immediately, ringing for Michaels to arrange its delivery. After the door closed again, though, it occurred to her that one small fly marred the ointment: Elma.
Elma would forbid such adventures. Indeed, Gwen had no doubt that Elma was complaining of her right now. Lady Lytton, the wife of the English ambassador, was a particular favorite of the Beechams’, and Elma was slated for lunch with her in the Palais-Royal. I brought her all the way to Paris, Elma would be complaining over oysters, and now she refuses to accompany me anywhere. Indeed, this morning she refused to leave bed.
Lady Lytton would not be surprised. She would nod understandingly and pat Elma’s hand. Of course, nobody could expect better from a girl who’d been jilted, crushed, flattened, twice now.
Gwen did not feel flattened, though. For the first time in what seemed like ages, she felt positively . . . robust.
Your help would be useful, Alex had written.
With a laugh, she flopped back onto the bed and spread out her limbs. As a girl, she’d visited a museum in Oxford that had displayed a dried sea specimen called a starfish. If one of its limbs got chopped off, the curator had said, another would grow overnight. Something like that had happened to her, perhaps. She felt more cheerful, even, than she had in the days before her jilting.
On an impulse, she lifted her heels into the air. Her nightgown fell down to her thighs. She considered her bare legs with interest; the cancan dancers at the Moulin Rouge had given her material for comparison. Slim ankles, nicely rounded calves. She preferred the dimpled knees she had seen last night; her own looked sadly knobby. But she could kick as well as anyone. She pointed her toe and delivered a solid punt to an imaginary Thomas Arundell. She felt better prepared than ever to give him a bit of what-for. Lily Goodrick was the Queen of the Barbary Coast, after all. She took guff from no man, least of all a spineless toad.
Perhaps today she’d find him.
“Completely certain,” said Elma. She sat across from Gwen in the sitting room, nearly vibrating with good spirits. “I had the news from Lady Lytton herself. He is her second cousin twice removed, you know, and he always pays her a visit before he leaves town. I suppose he thinks of her as he might his own mother, were his mother not such a dragon.” Elma paused to give a delicate shudder. “Narrow escape you had there, my dear.”
“But where has he gone?” Gwen asked. This was beyond deflating.
“Baden-Baden, says Lady Lytton, and thence to Corfu.”
Gwen nodded, now thoroughly confused. Elma had proposed a celebratory tea; were these the tidings they were meant to celebrate? If so, Gwen could not help but think it slightly mean-spirited. Elma knew that she had come here to retrieve the ring. Thomas’s absence was no cause to rejoice.
“Never fear,” said Elma, seeing the doubt on her face. “I have better news yet. But first, let’s raise our glasses.”
Wary now, Gwen held out one spindly china cup—cream with a splash of tea, per Elma’s preference. It was always possible, she supposed, that Elma was not about to propose that they toast the death of some countess on her wedding night, or the sudden expiry of an heir who’d had the audacity to be married already but whose younger brother yet languished in bachelorhood.
An anticipatory smile slipped free of Elma’s lips. “Darling,” she said, “first I must apologize for my temper this morning. I know that you’ve had a very trying time of it, and I should have realized that Paris is no place for a young woman in a troubled state of mind. What you required was rest, not this nervous, constant stimulus.”
“Oh no,” Gwen said quickly. “Please don’t apologize. I am sorry to have worried you, but I assure you, I had a grand time last night.”
“No, no, don’t forgive me; it wasn’t you whom I owed my temper. The blame rests solely with Mr. Ramsey. I confess, I expected a great deal more of him. Of course I know he is not widely considered worthy of respectable company, but I supposed our connections to his family would hold him to a better standard of behavior. I was gravely disappointed by what you told me, but as I said, rightfully it is he with whom I should quarrel.”
“But I was the one who insisted on going to Chat Noir,” Gwen said.
Elma lifted a brow. “Well,” she said, after a significant pause. “As I said, you’ve been through a trial. And one night won’t have done you any harm, provided you met no one we knew.” She frowned. “Goodness—you didn’t, did you?”
“No,” Gwen said hastily. “Nobody at all.”
Elma exhaled. “Then, as I said, no harm done. But I do think it’s time to leave, darling. To the countryside, for a bit of a constitutional, exactly as the Ramsey sisters suggested. Guernsey, we’d proposed, although Cornwall could serve nicely, too. Which do you prefer?”
Guernsey? Good heavens. “Aunt Elma,” she said carefully, “I think you misunderstand the situation. I do not feel overwrought in the slightest. Last night—”
“Enough about that. Don’t you wish to know what we’re celebrating?” Elma’s stern expression melted into a twinkle as she reached into her purse. “I have the most lovely surprise for you. First, you are well rid of the viscount, dear. His love is not for one such as you, it seems. You must not blame yourself one whit for his behavior. But while he is a rascal, he is not a dishonorable one—nor a thief, I am glad to say! Just look what he left in the care of dear Lady Lytton.”
She opened her hand. In it was Richard’s ring.
Gwen’s lips parted on a silent breath of surprise.
“Yes, dear,” Elma said gently. “Take it, do. I know how much it means to you, and I’m so glad to be the one who managed to return it to you.”
Slowly Gwen reached out. For a moment, as her fingers closed on the band—so much cooler than the air, a hard and alien pressure in her palm—she had a curious sense of déjà vu.
She ran her thumb along the band, finding the familiar striations at each side. It was the right ring. The brilliant gleam of the gold surprised her. It seemed as if recent contact with Pennington’s finger should have tarnished the metal.
She glanced up and found Elma beaming at her, waiting, no doubt, for some cathartic bout of tears, or, failing that, a fluttering joyous clamor. The occasion deserved it. With the return of the ring, her honor was redeemed, she supposed. And she was glad to have it back—truly. It was a piece of her family; it belonged with her. She would not have rested easily so long as it was missing.
But as she turned it over in her fingers, she realized that somewhere, during these last few days, the blemish that its absence had gouged into her self-regard seemed to have healed.
This ring had traveled farther, and had enjoyed so many more adventures, than she had.
“I wasn’t wrong to have given it to him,” she said, and this time, she believed it. “It was he who was at fault. I couldn’t have known.”
“No, of course not,” Elma said. “Nobody could have! But now you have it back, you will put him from your mind entirely. So many other men in the world! In London, right now, the bachelors are swarming.” She leaned forward, the rope of pearls at her neck swinging free. “Just think,” she said mischievously. “Some handsome lad in town is waiting for you, never suspecting the good fortune about to enter his life!”
Gwen laughed. Indeed, to the swarming bachelors, that would be precisely what she signified: a fortune, no more. She doubted Elma was even aware of the irony of the statement. “But I’m afraid my feelings haven’t changed, dear.” If anything, they had strengthened. “I’ve no wish to begin that rigmarole again. Indeed, I think I would like to stay in France a while yet.”
Elma’s mouth pursed. The movement drew into prominence the little lines she so loathed, which fanned out from her lips and the corners of her eyes. “Gwen, do be reasonable. After last night, I can hardly countenance remaining here.”
“Yes,” Gwen said hesitantly. “I understand; it would not be conscionable.” She lifted her own teacup to her nose, breathing deeply of the calming fragrance. The spice from the bergamot rind never failed to put her in mind of her father, who had drunk so much of the stuff that the scent had seemed permanently impressed into his clothes. He’d grown up on bohea, a watery broth made from third-rate scraps; he’d claimed that no luxury had ever startled and delighted him more than discovering the taste of proper tea. What a miraculous transubstantiation for common water, he’d often said. I tell you, Gwen, no man-made chemistry has ever surpassed it.
Exhaling, she set the cup down. “You needn’t stay, of course. I’m old enough to look after myself!”
The other woman’s eyes shot wide. “I—good Lord. You cannot mean to say you think to remain here alone?”
The incredulity gave her a moment’s pause. Yes, it did sound quite outré, didn’t it? “But . . . it wouldn’t be so unusual, would it? That is, I see women of my age all the time unchaperoned! In St. Pancras Station, for one.” She paused, struck by that truth. For all the money she had, she’d never experienced any true form of independence. “Why, they stand alone at the refreshment counter—drinking brandy, even! Many of them look quite respectable.”
Had she sprouted another head, Elma might have gawked at her so. “Working girls,” she said. “Typists, Gwen. Postal clerks! Surely you don’t mean to compare yourself to those people!”
“I—of course not.” That would be foolish. Such women did as they must in order to keep a roof over their heads. Perhaps, if they could have afforded it, they would have preferred to be looked after by somebody like Elma. “But that doesn’t make them disrespectable, surely. That is—they are no better or worse than my mother, before her marriage.”
Elma shook her head slowly, her lips forming an O. “Your mother,” she said. “Your mother wanted better for you than that!”
Gwen looked down to her tea. “But she would not have wanted me to marry without love,” she said.
“Nobody is asking you to do so. God above, what happened to you at that altar? Was your brain broken along with your heart?”
“My heart was not broken!” Gwen slammed down her teacup. “I’ve been trying to tell you that for some time now!”
Elma’s eyes narrowed. “Yes, so you have. But this is another order entirely.” Voice growing cold, she said, “Perhaps I should remind you that when I took you into our household, I vouched for your character. I risked my own name to promote you. What you may not know is that my friends warned me against it. They said, Elma, orchids do not grow from common barnyard soil. But I refused to hear a word against you. I told them they did not understand the sweetness, the sterling nature, of your character. Certainly I never dreamed—”
She broke off, her lips compressing; violently, she shook her head and looked away.
Gwen watched her miserably. The only response that suggested itself was supremely unkind. The fruits of common barnyard soil had, of course, paid the Beechams’ household bills for ten years now. It was not admiration for her character that had prompted Elma to take her in.
Elma’s head swiveled back. “No,” she said sharply. “I will not permit you to do this. And I shall hear no further debate on it! Do you understand me?”
The door opened without a knock, giving them both a dreadful start.
Alex leaned against the doorway, buttoning up his glove in a casual gesture. “Did I hear yelling?” he inquired pleasantly. “May I be of some assistance?”
Oh, dear God. Gwen shot him an urgent look of warning. Now was not the time!
“You,” Elma hissed, and came to her feet. “This is all your doing.”