Dukes Prefer Blondes

  He shrugged. “He may be harmless. Perhaps he simply marveled at your dress, and followed us in order to report to his disbelieving friends.”

  “He might have been lurking in the vicinity for some time,” Clara said. “I know some of the scandal sheets employ nondescript persons to follow quarry and report. They’ve been keeping a close watch on me for months.”

  This was a reasonable assumption, too. But the sense of trouble remained.

  “Blast,” he said. “Then I’d better not debauch you in the park.”

  “You told me we needed to take a rest from debauchery,” she said. “Until tonight.”

  “I forgot,” he said. “This drive has turned out more exciting than I’d expected. Danger is known to be an aphrodisiac.”

  “I didn’t know that,” she said.

  “Maybe we’d better go home,” he said. “I can take a cold bath.”

  “And our follower?”

  “He can drown himself in the pond for all I care.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  On one side of me lay a wood, than which Nature cannot produce a finer; and, on the other, the Thames, with its shelvy bank and charming lawns, rising like an amphitheatre: along which, here and there, one espies a picturesque white house, aspiring in majestic simplicity to pierce the dark foliage of the surrounding trees: thus studding, like stars in the galaxy, the rich expanse of this charming vale. Sweet Richmond . . .

  —­Kitson Cromwell Thomas, Excursions in the County of Surrey, 1821

  But Radford didn’t drive home. He couldn’t. Not yet.

  This was a mystery. To drive away with no answers, not even a clue, was unthinkable.

  Even after he decided to take a longer route, the boy trailed them through the park and did an exceptional job of finding cover or disappearing into the scenery.

  Another man might simply stop the vehicle and give chase or find another way of cornering their watcher.

  Radford wasn’t another man.

  “Are you lost?” Clara said.

  He treated her to a raised eyebrow.

  “Right,” she said. “You’d probably have to make a special effort to get lost.”

  “I might be able to do it in an unfamiliar place after dark,” he said. “Though the sun is sinking, we’ve light yet, and I know this park well. If I didn’t, I’d rely on you. It’s the boy.”

  “I didn’t think you could leave it alone.”

  “No, it’s a curse at times,” he said. “Here I am, newly wed, eager to debauch my bride. But no, I must play cat and mouse with a brat from the London streets—­or at any rate a brat from streets of some kind. He’s too quick and cunning to be an ordinary child.”

  “I know you have an excellent reason for not stopping the vehicle and giving chase.”

  “Two,” he said.

  “Firstly,” she said.

  He looked at her. She looked at him, her expression sober, her blue eyes glinting with laughter.

  He said, “If he’s the type I’m sure he is, he has a better than even chance of outrunning me. Such boys learn speed at an early age. He’s smaller than I and closer to the ground. Youth, size, and gravity are on his side.”

  “Secondly.”

  “Thank you, my dear, for helping with the counting.”

  She laughed. What a sound! Easy, unaffected. It was a sound like the look of sun breaking through clouds. And there was the chipped tooth, her little battle scar.

  “Secondly, all I’ll gain from a confrontation is the exercise of chasing him,” he said. “I could shake him, dangle him upside down from a high window, threaten him with the authorities, bribe him, or subject him to the tortures of the Inquisition. The most likely responses are defiance, silence, or Cockney humor.”

  “The way the boys answered when I asked for Toby,” she said. She went on to mimic them—­with surprising accuracy—­and he realized he’d only begun to discover her.

  He said, “Instead, I’m going to test his stamina. Odds are I’ll get a better look at him, and that ought to jog my memory as to what’s familiar about him.”

  Radford led the spy hither and yon until twilight, when he drove into Richmond. “Let’s pay a visit to the Talbot Inn,” he said. “We can order an early and leisurely dinner. We’ll see whether he’s waiting for us when we come out.”

  “How very interesting this day is turning out to be,” she said. “In so many ways.”

  “Not quite what I’d planned,” he said. “I meant to take you farther afield, where the locals wouldn’t recognize Raven Radford and his beautiful highborn bride. But you’re used to ­people—­especially men—­staring, and we can claim a private dining parlor. Mainly it’ll be the waiters gawking at us and trying to eavesdrop. Or trying to memorize your dress, to astonish their wives and sisters.”

  Clara thought this was a wonderful way to spend the time before the supper and education in marital intimacy he’d promised. To dine at an inn while setting a trap for a spy, or at least deducing a clue or two, was a most satisfactory, not-­at-­all-­ordinary way to start a marriage. Whatever trials and tribulations lay ahead, she did not believe boredom or suffocation would play a part.

  Squirrel hadn’t ever had to deal with Raven, like some others. He hated him just as much as the others did, though. Chiver was the one who saved Squirrel when he was near beat to death, and Chiver was the one who took him into the gang and gave him the first full meal he’d ever had.

  Now Chiver was dead, and everybody knew the police raid was Raven’s doing.

  Squirrel hated this place, too. Trees everywhere, and hills like mountains. And the bloody great park!

  But he had to be here. Husher stole clothes for him and got money from somebody—­he didn’t say who or how—­to pay for the hackney Squirrel had traveled in.

  Because Jacob needed a spy, and Squirrel was the only one Raven wouldn’t recognize.

  “Stick close and tell me what he does and where he goes,” Jacob had told him. “Then we’ll find a way to get him, so nobody will ever know what happened to him. We’ll do for him and slide him quiet into the river.” And he’d laughed. How he’d laughed.

  Yes, it was all great larks to Jacob, but he wasn’t the one running after a carriage through trees and mountains and the carriage going on and on, round and round.

  Squirrel had never been outside of London, and this was like a foreign country. Everything smelled wrong, even in the village, which wasn’t like a proper town at all.

  Now Raven and his Long Meg were in the inn and could be in there for hours, in the warm, eating and drinking, while Squirrel stood outside and froze and starved and took care nobody noticed him.

  It was a cold and windy night, but he had to stand away from the inn’s warmth because he had to keep clear of the lamps and lighted windows.

  Raven had sharp eyes, everybody knew. But he’d never met up with Squirrel, and it better stay that way.

  He waited in the stable yard. The ones who worked here were too busy to bother about him. Other sorts loitered here and gossiped. He could tell what they were: a pickpocket or two, maybe, and some girls whose kind he knew. But he didn’t know who to trust, so he kept out of their way—­had to learn how to do that a long time ago, didn’t he, unless he was looking for black eyes or broken bones.

  Then Raven came out, and Squirrel had to move fast, behind a wagon.

  The lawyer talked to one of the stablemen. Squirrel didn’t move, and tried not to breathe. It was dark, but they said Raven had sharp ears, too. Sharp everything. Too sharp by half.

  But Jacob and Husher would dull him down, and he wouldn’t be hearing or seeing anything, ever again.

  A woman who’d been loitering in the yard sauntered to the carriage as Radford was about to climb into his seat. She murmured something to him in a language vaguely like English. Not enoug
h like it, though, for Clara to understand.

  Whatever the woman had to say earned her a coin from Radford, though it didn’t make him linger.

  “I’ll give our follower credit,” he said as they drove out of the inn yard. “His reflexes are top-­notch, and he’s good at making himself inconspicuous. But not to her.”

  “I didn’t know you had informants in Richmond as well as London,” Clara said.

  “Millie used to ply her trade in London,” Radford said. “She helped me now and again. When she ended up in the criminal court for the fifth time, I saved her from transportation. The judge’s condition for leniency was, she was never again to appear at the Old Bailey. Since one couldn’t expect her to make a new life in her old haunts, I helped her move here.”

  “Has she made a new life?” Clara said.

  “She married one of the stablemen. She takes in laundry and mending. She helps at the inn. Hard work, but easier than what she used to do. Safer, too, and better conditions overall: regular meals, a roof over her head, and a man who treats her well. She’s a help to him and to the inn in other ways. She’s good at spotting potential troublemakers, a survival skill acquired during her previous career. She was about to report the boy when she saw me come out to speak to her husband.”

  “I could not understand a word she said,” Clara said. “It sounded like a proposition, and I did wonder at her boldness—­when I was sitting in the carriage, not easy to overlook.”

  “She used that tone to keep our spy from suspecting she’d been spying on him.” Radford gave a short laugh. “This hasn’t been the most romantic evening, but at least we’ve had an entertaining game of cat and mouse.”

  “It seemed romantic to me,” Clara said.

  “What, half of Richmond descending on the Talbot Inn to get a close look at my bride? The servants seizing every thin excuse to visit our private dining parlor, though the innkeeper himself insisted on attending us?”

  “It was romantic because we played cat and mouse with our watcher,” Clara said. “And because you assumed I’d enjoy the game, too.”

  And because he’d told her during dinner what he was thinking, and what theories he formulated about the boy. Because he listened to her theories and answered her questions without calling her simpleminded more than once or twice, and then with the affectionate humor that warmed her.

  “I knew you’d object to being kept out of it,” he said.

  “What did she say, then?”

  “She noticed him because he behaved suspiciously. He’d kept to the darkest parts of the yard, but at one point a carriage drove in and the lantern light caught him. He was small and thin—­a runt, like a thousand other boys she’s known. She said he had a pronounced misalignment of his jaw—­”

  “Pronounced misalignment? Millie said that?”

  “I translated,” he said. “She sketched his profile in the air with her finger and said he had a rat face, from which I deduced buck teeth. But he had very full cheeks. As she put it, ‘He looked like he was saving nuts in them.’ Though he was better dressed than boys from her old London neighborhoods, she said he was one of their kind. When she saw him scurry to hide behind a wagon when I came out, she arrived at a logical conclusion.”

  “Whoever he is, if he’s kept it up for all this time, at night, in this cold, one may assume he isn’t doing it for fun,” Clara said. “He’s doing it for pay or hasn’t a choice.”

  “I’d rather see him for myself,” Radford said. “The description fits no boy I ever met. There are thousands I haven’t met—­though I do wonder why he seems familiar.”

  “He could be someone you saw in passing and had no reason to pay attention to.”

  He shrugged. “Possibly. If he follows us to the house, I’ll accost him. By now he’ll be tired and cold. Hungry, too, unless he carried food with him. Even so, cold and fatigue would be enough to slow him.”

  But within a few minutes of their leaving the inn, Radford said, “He’s gone.”

  Clara knew better than to ask, Are you sure? She said, “I was looking forward so much to your accosting and interrogating him. I would have helped.”

  “Despair not, O queen of all realms of my life,” Radford said. “Maybe he’ll be back tomorrow. Tonight, meanwhile, I believe I’ll interrogate you—­quite closely—­instead.”

  That night

  She made him wait.

  Radford’s bride wanted a long soak in a hot bath, she said. She suggested he read a book.

  Clearly his lady needed no instructions for developing her skills in the marital arts. The undisciplined being who lived in his brain quivered with anticipation.

  Banishing the overeager inner self, he took a leisurely bath, too.

  No reason in the world to hurry. They had all the night ahead of them.

  He could use the time to plan—­and not think about the blasted boy, their shadow. Nothing could be done about him tonight, and it was a waste of mental energy to think about him. He pushed Millie’s runt with the stuffed cheeks into one of the cupboards of his mind and shut and locked the door. His lady offered a far more agreeable topic for meditation.

  After his bath, he donned a dressing gown and slippers and, shockingly, nothing else.

  She might wear all the clothes she liked. All the more fun taking them off.

  He made his way to their place of rendezvous, the sitting room, and thought about taking her clothes off and how best to accomplish this and what else he could do to keep things interesting.

  Eventually their supper arrived. It was the light collation she’d asked for: cold meats and pastries, fruit and cheese and such. A footman, having erased his face of all expression, set it out on a small table by the fire. When he’d arranged everything to a nicety, he quietly vanished.

  Radford got up and replaced one chair with a cushioned one. He collected other cushions and placed them nearby. This was something he preferred to do himself. In fact, he preferred to do most things himself.

  That would have to change, a bit.

  Among other things, he’d need more servants in his married life. He didn’t mind the expense. Firstly, it was for Clara’s benefit. Secondly, he could afford it without hardship. Not a ducal retinue, but a handful, certainly. What he minded was having them underfoot.

  Still, his father had adapted. So could the son. He was willing to be civilized. To a point.

  Clara entered the sitting room, and for a moment he stopped breathing.

  She wore a cream-­colored lot of froth, nothing like a normal dressing gown. He supposed the nightdress under it was even more abnormal, thanks to the French dressmakers. Though it covered her completely, with ruffles and lace at the neck and fluttering down the front opening—­which fastened with ribbon ties, he noted—­the fabric was thin and the cut cunningly devised to show all the glorious contours of her body.

  “Do you think that’s entirely fair?” he said, gesturing at her.

  “Don’t you like it?” she said.

  “Let me see. Turn around. Slowly.”

  She did. He swallowed a groan. And another.

  When she faced him again, she gave two slow, sleepy blinks and said, “What do you think?”

  He said. “Very nice. Let’s take it off.”

  Clara had gone to a great deal of trouble getting into the ensemble. That was to say, Davis had done all the tying and hooking and muttering about French dressmakers.

  It took Radford very little time to get it off, though he never seemed to hurry. But his hands—­those clever, agile hands—­worked so quickly and smoothly. In two heartbeats, it seemed, she was wearing nothing at all. Then he sank to his knees . . . and down, further . . . and then it was his tongue and his hands on her bare skin, teasing and heating her. Her knees weakened and her legs shook, and he said gruffly, “Perhaps your ladyship would like to sit down
.”

  She’d like to lie down, but the chair was nearest and her knees were buckling, and she dropped into it and gasped, “Good heavens.”

  He returned his mouth and tongue and hands to their work. Soon her spine gave way, and she began to slide from the chair. As she began to sink helplessly downward, he pulled nearby cushions onto the floor for her to land on.

  She said voice as thick as her mind, “I’m not sure I can survive this. Oh!”

  “I promised to worship you with my body,” he said. “I said it in front of everybody.”

  His tongue, his wicked tongue. His hands, his artful hands.

  He made every inch of her quiver, inside and outside. He caressed her and kissed her. He suckled her and she thought she’d scream with the pleasure of it and the madness, too, knocking away all her lady-­ness and the veneer of civilization and letting loose a wanton.

  And at last, when she thought she’d die of wanting him, he gave himself to her. His body joined hers, and he moved with her in the way that now seemed so completely right and natural, the union of body and soul she’d been waiting for all her life. She’d had only the dimmest sense, before, of what she’d been waiting for. But she had it now, she knew.

  With my body I thee worship. Yes, he’d said that yesterday. Was it only yesterday?

  And this is forever, she thought, the last coherent though she had. Then the moment came, the peak of joy she’d so recently discovered, and she swam into forever, and floated there, in his arms, until she drifted into a sweet, soft darkness, and slept.

  A maid had delivered their morning coffee and cleared away last night’s debris, and Radford had expected to go down to breakfast, as one usually did.

  But shortly after the maid, the footman reappeared, this time with breakfast. He set it on the table before the fire, reinvigorated the fire, and departed.

  Clara, emerging from her dressing room in a more demure dressing gown than she’d worn last night, said, “Oh, how kind of your mother.” She blushed. “She wanted us to have a bit more privacy.”