Midnight Pleasures

  “So I got up. I got up and I crept through the halls, in my nightshirt, because she always came. But I hadn’t got far when—”

  “What happened, Patrick?”

  His arm convulsively drew Sophie closer to his body. “I heard her screaming,” he said. “I ran back to bed and hid my head under the covers. The next morning, I thought it had been a dream, but she had died.”

  “Oh, Patrick, that’s so sad!”

  He reared up on his elbow and looked at her in shock. His elegant wife was sobbing uncontrollably.

  “What on earth? Sophie! Don’t cry, sweetheart; it wasn’t so terrible.”

  Sophie only wept harder, burying her head in his shirt. Patrick kissed the edge of her forehead, which was all he could see of her face. Finally she stopped, and allowed Patrick to dry her face with his handkerchief.

  “I’m sorry,” she said sheepishly. “I’m rather melancholic this afternoon.” Then she blushed a little, thinking of all the fibs she was telling him. She knew exactly why she was melancholic.

  Patrick looked at her blush and had a sudden thought. “Your fit of melancholy has nothing to do with my staying above board all day?”

  “It has nothing to do with that,” Sophie said, her voice wavering a bit as he traced a line of kisses down her neck. “I feel weepy, that’s all.” Her tone was just slightly defensive.

  Aha, Patrick realized. Sophie is at that point of the month. Well, it was nice to know that his wife reacted with tears rather than by throwing things, as Arabella had done. Arabella was like clockwork. Every month she demolished a piece of crockery by tossing it at his head. What Sophie doesn’t yet realize, Patrick thought, is that there is no disguising that particular event from one’s husband.

  “Are you regular?” he asked.

  Sophie looked confused. “Regular at what?”

  A small blush crept up Patrick’s bronzed neck. “Regular … in the womanly way,” he said, gesturing awkwardly with his hand.

  Sophie noticed with fascination that Patrick seemed to be gesturing toward her waist. Finally she grasped his meaning, and then she blushed.

  “Ah, yes, more or less … well, not particularly.”

  “Oh, irregular.” Patrick’s tone was smug. “That is likely because you were a maiden, and now that you’re married, everything will steady down.”

  Sophie looked at him in horror. “How do you know such things?”

  Patrick evaded the question. “We need to speak openly, Sophie, because regularity is the key to preventing the birth of a child.”

  Sophie gaped. “What are you talking about?”

  “There are certain times of the month when a couple can make love without danger of conceiving children,” he explained. “And then there are things one can do to prevent conception during the rest of the month. None of which I have been attending to,” he added, a shadow of a frown crossing his face. “It must be you, Sophie.”

  “Me!”

  “Your body,” Patrick said, his mouth hovering just above hers. “I have been intoxicated for the last month or so. But we mustn’t continue to act like feckless lovers, Sophie. As soon as your next monthly flux appears, tell me and we can determine a schedule.”

  “I have never shared this information with anyone,” Sophie said, with just a bit of an edge in her voice. “Nor has anyone ever demanded schedules or information of any kind.”

  “You were never married before,” Patrick pointed out. He was taking little nips around her chin. “We’ve been very lucky so far. Do you think it will start tomorrow?”

  Sophie’s voice was definitely stiff. “I have no idea.

  Well, I do, Patrick thought to himself. But there was no point in throwing his intimate knowledge of women’s moods in his wife’s face. She already thought of him as kin to Don Juan.

  “Let’s have supper in bed,” Patrick said, his tone persuasive. “I’ll feed you.”

  Sophie’s eyes widened. “You’ll feed me?” Patrick’s smile was devilish, irresistible. “You’ll like it. I promise.”

  In fact, Sophie was enthralled by the experience of eating in bed. She took to having lemon mousse nibbled from parts of her body with such entrancing eagerness that mundane thoughts of schedules, conception, and the like flew from both their minds.

  Faced with the choice of losing his daughter to the great American wilderness or allowing her to pretend to be a French aristocrat for a few weeks, Madeleine’s father did not hesitate.

  “Do you love this galumph?” he asked Madeleine, in swift French, as Braddon stood politely by her side.

  “Oui, Papa,” Madeleine replied, with maidenly docility. “But he is not a galumph, Papa!”

  “He is a galumph,” her father said heavily. “However, he is also an earl, and you could make a worse match.

  “Do you have a good estate?” Heavy gray eyebrows frowned at Braddon, who started, having lost track of the conversation once it shifted into French. He’d never been any good at languages.

  “Yes,” Braddon responded hastily, prodded by Madeleine’s elbow. “I have twenty-five thousand pounds a year. My estate is in Leicestershire, and I have houses in Delbington and London. I have good stables in Leicestershire,” he added, “thirty-four horses at last count.”

  “Thirty-four! No great house has fewer than fifty horses,” Vincent Garnier snapped. Then he looked keenly at his future son-in-law. Too much inbreeding among English aristocrats. That was Slaslow’s problem. “And which earl are you?”

  Braddon gaped. What on earth did the old fellow mean? “The Earl of Slaslow,” he stammered.

  “No! Which number are you?”

  “Oh,” Braddon replied. “I’m the second. M’father was made into an earl in the ‘60s.”

  He watched Vincent scowl. It seemed even horse trainers knew that second earls were new earls. “M’great-grandfather was a viscount,” Braddon said defensively.

  “Humph.”

  “I wish to marry this man,” Madeleine said to her father, ignoring silly male fidgets over numbers of horses and numbers of earls.

  “You may not marry him if he intends to take you to America,” her father stated.

  “Then we shall stay in London and pretend that I am a French aristocrat,” Madeleine said practically. “Braddon’s friend will help me learn how to be a great lady. I shall go to a ball, and Braddon will pretend to fall in love with me, and there we are!”

  Garnier’s mouth twisted. Clearly it went against the grain with him to countenance such a tricky scheme.

  “And if someone finds out?” he growled at Braddon.

  “I’ll marry Madeleine immediately,” Braddon said. “I’d just as soon get married now anyway. My family can’t do anything about it, and I don’t give a toss for my reputation among the ton.”

  Garnier looked approving at that.

  “You could be the daughter of the Marquis de Flammarion,” he said grudgingly to Madeleine. “You are the same age.”

  “Oh, Papa,” Madeleine cried, “what a splendid idea!” She turned to Braddon. “My papa worked for the marquis and his family. I was too young when we left France to be able to remember them, but Papa has told me all about their estate in the Limousin, and the house in Paris, on Rue de Vosgirard. The marquis was rather strange and rarely went about, but his wife was very beautiful and elegant.”

  “What about relatives, sir? London is crammed full of French émigrés, and they all seem to know one another.”

  “No one knew the family of the marquis,” Garnier said. “He kept himself to himself. His wife, yes. She used to travel to Paris occasionally. But the marquis and his daughter were always at home.”

  “That’s all right, then,” Braddon said with relief. “You don’t need to talk about it much, Madeleine. After all, if the marquis’s daughter was around your age during all the troubles in France, she wouldn’t remember much.”

  He turned to Garnier. “I presume the marquis didn’t survive? He won’t be turning up in Lond
on, will he?”

  Garnier shook his head firmly, his lips pressed in a straight line.

  But Madeleine didn’t look entirely happy. “How can I pretend to be the daughter of the Marquise de Flammarion?” she said miserably, looking at her papa. “You have told me again and again how elegant, how perfect the marquise was. What of the people who knew her? They will take one look at me and know that I am nothing like the beautiful marquise!”

  The two men who loved her most in the world looked at Madeleine blankly.

  “You are beautiful,” Braddon said, absolute faith in his voice. “Besides, daughters often don’t look like their mothers. Look at my poor sister Margaret. M’mother used to swear that the girl had too many freckles to be her daughter, but Margaret made a perfectly reasonable marriage, for all that.”

  There was a moment of silence after this tangled speech.

  Vincent Garnier’s brows were drawn together in a terrible scowl. “You are a lovely girl,” he told Madeleine presumptively. “Besides, people will assume that you take after the marquis.”

  “But they must have known what he looked like,” Madeleine persisted. “I am sure he was slim and elegant too.” She looked down at her curvaceous body. “I simply don’t look like an aristocrat!”

  “You look better than any of those frivolous muffin-brained women,” her father bellowed. “I do not want to hear another word about it!”

  Madeleine jumped in surprise. Her father was a taciturn man, not given to speaking overmuch. But he rarely shouted either.

  “All right, Papa,” she agreed.

  Braddon took her arm and smiled down at her, his blue eyes clear and truthful. “I wouldn’t want you to be slim and elegant, Madeleine. I want you just the way you are.” Something about his tone made a flush rise in Madeleine’s cheeks.

  “Ne dîtes pas ça!” she protested. “Papa will hear you!”

  But when Madeleine looked over at her father, he had turned back to his accounting books, and she couldn’t tell by the little smile tugging at his mouth whether he had heard Braddon’s comment or not.

  “Go! Go!” Garnier barked. He looked sharply at Braddon. “You may ask Lady Sophie to visit us when she returns from her wedding trip. I should like to meet the woman who is supposed to teach my daughter to become a lady. From The Morning Post, she appears a mere fribble!”

  Braddon bowed respectfully, hoping to God that Sophie was not one of those women who would put up a fuss about visiting a public stable. And hoping that the Lark would return to London soon.

  Lord Breksby fully shared Braddon’s feelings about the return of the Lark. He was spending quite a bit of his time fretting over the unpleasant news that Napoleon hoped to sabotage England’s gift to Selim.

  Sophie’s mother, caught up in a whirlwind of new, but not unpleasant, experiences, also wished fervently that her daughter would return to London. Eloise found the house strangely silent without Sophie, even populated as it was by some forty servants. On the other hand, she seemed to bump into George wherever she turned, whereas before her daughter married, she saw him only in the evening.

  Somehow her husband wasn’t as interested in ambling off to the club as he used to be. Now that he had breached the sacred portals of his wife’s bedroom … well, it was a good bit of fun to lure his starchy marchioness into an afternoon indiscretion. But George missed his little Sophie, too. It hadn’t occurred to him just how much he counted on her blithe acceptance and love to make him feel less—could it be lonely? Shaking off the thought, George went to find Eloise. Why not bother his wife, even if it was only ten in the morning?

  All in all, there was quite a flock of Londoners thinking about the Lark‘s return to port. Down in the district known as the Whitefriars, a sleek and sinuous gentleman was expressing that very wish.

  “As soon as Foakes returns,” he said, turning his eyes from the spiders dangling from the dark and lowly rafters above him, “I suggest that we approach him … gently.”

  His companion wrestled with his meaning. “Whether we’re gentle or not,” he pointed out, “Foakes hasn’t got the scepter. And now they won’t give it to him till he’s over there, I hear. It’s a shame, that’s what it is. A bloody shame.”

  Monsieur Foucault (for so he was known when in London) sighed. He did not know how the information had leaked to the English government about his delicious plan to substitute an exploding scepter for Selim’s ruby scepter, but there was no point in weeping over it. “Clemper has been turned off, and we now have no way to obtain access to the scepter.” His tone was a delicate reprimand. “We must, therefore, obtain our goal through other means. And our goal is to ensure that the English ambassador presents a serious danger to Selim’s coronation.”

  “I still think it’s a shame,” said Mole (for so he was known among his intimates). “I had it all set up so beautiful. Clemper was going to substitute the scepter in the flash of an eye.”

  Monsieur Foucault sighed again. It pained him as well, since he intended to appropriate a few of the rubies with which the English government was so liberally adorning the scepter.

  “Why don’t I turn one of the new fellows working on the scepter?” Mole suggested.

  “Impossible,” Foucault replied. The odor in Mole’s little house was truly distasteful. Foucault decided to breathe through his mouth, which gave his voice a curiously breathy tone. “The original jewelers have been dismissed, to the man, and I am quite certain that the new employees will be less amiable than our dear Clemper.”

  “Well, you may be right,” Mole allowed. “So what do we say to Foakes when he returns?”

  “I believe that we shall approach the gentleman as ambassadors from Selim’s court,” Foucault replied.

  “Oh.” There was a moment of silence.

  “You do speak Turkish … I distinctly recollect that being a condition of my employment,” Monsieur Foucault said gently, taking a lace handkerchief from his pocket and waving it before him. He did not look at Mole.

  “I speak some,” Mole said, just a trifle dubiously. “Learned it at my mother’s knee, I did.”

  Monsieur Foucault did not express his belief that Mole’s mother was an unlikely teacher. “Bu masa mi? Translate that, if you please, my dear Mole.” Behind his dreamy tone was more than a hint of steel.

  But Mole was up to the challenge. “ ‘Yes, this is a table,’ “ he ventured, rapping the sturdy wood before him.

  Foucault smiled, and Mole relaxed. “You needn’t say much,” Foucault observed. “I shall present myself as a envoy from Selim’s court. And my Turkish is excellent.”

  Mole nodded. He plucked at his worsted trousers.

  “I shall send my tailor to you,” Monsieur Foucault said, a glint of amusement in his eye. It suited his sense of humor to command the delicate François, his genius of a tailor, to enter the perilous darkness of the Whitefriars alleyways.

  Mole nodded again.

  “You, my dear Mole, might keep an eye on Patrick Foakes’s town house in the next few days. I should like to approach him just as soon as he returns. And while you are there … perhaps you would be kind enough to enquire about his household, in the remote, remote possibility that our gentle approach does not prosper.”

  Mole’s eyes brightened. This he could understand. “Right you are,” he said cheerily.

  Monsieur Foucault strolled back out to his waiting carriage, a smile hovering on his thin lips.

  Chapter 17

  The Lark docked late on a Tuesday evening in March, having been gone some six weeks. The Honorable Patrick Foakes and his party had to wait a good half-hour to disembark, to the delight of four stevedores lounging on the dock. They didn’t notice the presence of a rapscallion French lad, but they certainly did notice Sophie, whose petite form and fair curls were the very emblem of a lovely Englishwoman. A demure, proper English lady.

  Which she wasn’t.

  The Lark docked with a rebel onboard. Sophie had sailed to Wales with no thought
of helping Braddon. Yet as the boat neared the dock, along with the realization that she had nothing to fill her time but the dreary round of shopping and taking tea, a sneaking, wicked ambition began to grow in her heart. Eloise prided herself on her social acumen, on her ability to spot a less-than-perfect lady at ten paces. Who better than her daughter to fool the entire ton and pass off a horse trainer’s daughter as a French aristocrat?

  Forget learning languages that she would never be able to speak. Sophie was going to become an artist, like her friend Charlotte. She would create the picture of a French lady. A living testament to Eloise’s strong-minded training, if only Eloise knew. Which she never would, Sophie reminded herself. Her mother’s moral sense was far too strong to countenance an intruder breaching the sacred walls of the ton.

  One problem loomed large. What would Patrick think of the whole scheme? Sometimes Sophie imagined he would relish the drama and the hint of risk, and sometimes she thought he’d be disgusted by the attempt.

  That evening, Patrick, Sophie, and Henri were just finishing a late supper when Sophie asked, “Didn’t you and Braddon used to carry through a great many schemes when you were at school together?”

  At the mention of Braddon’s name, Patrick looked up. Oddly enough, he had just been wondering whether Sophie had yet forgotten about Braddon. It seemed not.

  “Silly childhood stunts,” he said brusquely, returning to his chicken. “Why do you ask?”

  “Oh, no real reason,” Sophie said airily. “I was just thinking about Braddon and you as children.”

  Worse and worse, from Patrick’s point of view. Why on earth would his wife want to spend a moment contemplating Braddon, unless she was hoping to see him soon?

  “What sort of stunts?” Henri’s eyes were bright with interest.

  “Braddon was always trying to gammon some teacher into thinking that he was someone other than himself.”

  Henri shrugged. That didn’t sound very interesting. “May I be excused?” he asked. He was slowly returning to the normal pursuits of a healthy twelve-year-old, far from the rigors of war. He had spent the afternoon in Patrick’s stables, and the stableboy had offered to show him a painting of a two-headed cow in the evening.