Reggie, it turned out, was full of admiration for the viscount’s prowess and thought fifty quid a cheap price for such a marvelous mill. If Granny had kept back a few of the girl’s rags and trinkets, what was that to St. Denys’s heir? If he wanted, he could have decked the wench like a queen and never noticed the cost.
“But the gal run away after all,” Lord Browdie reminded in desperation. “Joke’s on him, don’t you see?”
“Joke’s on her, rather. Where’s she now? Probably haunting Drury Lane. Didn’t know an opportunity when it bit her on the nose. Women,” the baronet muttered scornfully.
This conversation threatened to restore Lord Browdie to the foul temper in which he’d begun a day that had started with a hangover and climaxed with the humiliation of parading his tawdry mistress in front of the two people he hated most in this world.
If he broadcast the tale, he would only gild Lord Rand’s reputation as a virile, dashing fellow. Lord Browdie’s bitterness increased. He believed himself betrayed and illused on all sides.
Here he was, forced to skulk on the sidelines while the arrogant, yellow-haired viscount squired Catherine Pelliston about town. Only a few weeks before, Browdie had been the chit’s affianced husband, her property and money virtually in his grasp. Now the nasty, sharp faced female had the effrontery to declare herself not at home when he called—and he her papa’s oldest friend!
Miss Prim and Proper had no time for him, not when she could be flaunting herself all over London with her pretty viscount. What would Miss High and Mighty think if she heard how her golden darling spent his leisure hours—and with whom? Did Madam Propriety think she could reform Viscount Vagabond?
Lord Browdie smiled, displaying a crooked set of brown teeth to his companion. Once again the black storm clouds drifted away and he saw the happy sunshine. He could not tell the world his tale, but he must tell her. That was his duty as her papa’s oldest, dearest friend.
Chapter Thirteen
Considering the outrages to which he was inevitably goaded by Miss Pelliston’s mere presence, it did not bode well for the viscount to be found dancing with her that evening at Miss Gravistock’s birthday ball. Still, Lord Rand had action in mind, and that action required her assistance.
“Lead him on?” Catherine echoed in bewilderment when he began to describe her role. “Are you drunk yet?”
Her partner bit back a hasty retort. “You can’t get information from Browdie unless you speak with him, which means you have to be more welcoming than you’ve been. Looking at a man as though he was something the horse left behind isn’t the way to elicit confidences. You have to be more encouraging. You may even have to dance with him.”
Whatever indignant response Catherine might have made to this is lost to posterity, the dance at that moment inconsiderately requiring that they separate.
As he watched her move away, Max decided that the rose silk gown became her nearly as well as the militant light flashing in her eyes and the faint flush of anger that tinted her cheeks. Something stirred within him and he grew edgy.
Miss Pelliston must have become edgy as well, because when she rejoined her partner she told him icily that she had no interest in Lord Browdie’s confidences.
“Very well,” said Lord Rand. “Trust him if you like. Maybe he doesn’t know about Granny’s. Maybe he won’t say anything if he does know. Maybe it wouldn’t help to find out where you stand so that you can make an intelligent decision about what to do.”
Miss Pelliston did not deign to reply, though her deepening colour told him he’d struck home.
“Well?” he said after a moment.
“I concede your point,’’ she said stiffly.
As he gazed down upon her rigidly composed features, the viscount wondered how quickly her expression would soften if he covered her face with kisses. Simultaneously he felt a surging desire to run—very, very far away.
Lord Browdie, it turned out, was eager to unburden himself. In fact, in his haste to claim a dance with Miss Pelliston, he elbowed aside one duke, two baronets, one colonel, and one affronted Jack Langdon, who would have called him out on the spot if Max had not been there to hear his complaints.
“Call him out?” Max exclaimed, as he drew his friend aside. “You don’t know one end of a pistol from the other, I’ll have to take you to Manton’s shooting gallery for regular practice if you plan to take up this sort of hobby. Or did you mean to stand at twenty paces and throw books at him?”
Mr. Langdon thrust one aesthetically long hand into his already rumpled brown hair and reduced mere disorder to complete chaos. That his disheveled locks and distract aspect made him seem more romantically poetical than ever to several ladies in the vicinity was a circumstance of which he was as sublimely unaware as he was of those ladies’ existence. He could not know that his rumpled hair and absent expression made women want to take him in hand and smooth him out.
Jack knew only that he’d elbowed his way through Miss Pelliston’s crowd of admirers—who seemed to be growing more numerous by the minute—and had been about to request the favour of a dance when some ugly old brute had rudely thrust him out of the way.
Jack Langdon was not by nature a violent man. Like Max, he’d spent his childhood being bullied. Unlike Max, he had not rebelled by running away physically. Jack had quietly escaped into the pages of his books. He liked Miss Pelliston excessively because talking to her was like hiding in a book—an attractive book, to be sure, but a safe, quiet, pleasant one, where no emotional or physical demands were made of him.
At the moment, however, he was feeling homicidally unquiet. As he watched Lord Browdie lead the young lady out, Mr. Langdon knew an unfamiliar yearning to commit mayhem. Fortunately for the peace of the company, Lord Rand was able to appease his friend by offering him the supper dance with Miss Pelliston.
The viscount did not make this sacrifice out of pure compassion. He had suddenly produced an idea that involved action, instead of hovering about boring himself to tears at a hot stuffy party filled with the same dull people he met at every other hot stuffy party. This was a more reasonable explanation than that he was desperate to put as much distance as possible between himself and a rose silk gown.
“You see, Jack, I’ve just recalled an appointment,” he explained. “The trouble is, I’ve already asked her, and Louisa will have my head if I abandon her. Won’t you be a good fellow and take my place? I daresay Miss Pelliston will be delighted.”
Lord Rand was not being deceitful. He was certain the young lady had rather Jack’s company than his own—just as the viscount had rather Lady Diana’s company. As a matter of fact, he couldn’t understand why he hadn’t asked Lady Diana for the confounded supper dance. Mayhap he’d known instinctively that he wouldn’t stay long and therefore had better ask one who wouldn’t miss him.
Perhaps Lord Rand’s thinking was not as clear as it should be. That was his problem, however. Mr. Langdon, upon being granted supper with a book in the form of a most agreeable young lady, was instantly restored to his customary state of abstracted serenity.
While Mr. Langdon recovered from his flirtation with violence, Miss Pelliston was enduring a jovial, avuncular lecture from her former fiance. The lecture would have been altogether unendurable—Lord Browdie avuncular was not a pretty sight—if it had not brought her so much relief. The baron obviously believed the young woman purchased from the bawd was someone else.
Catherine could not appear relieved, of course. She had to feign shock at learning of Lord Rand’s sordid entertainments. Since his vices were a sorrow to her—as they must be to any right-thinking lady—this would not have been so very trying, except that the activities Lord Browdie referred to with such sanctimonious relish were precisely those with which he entertained himself.
Hypocrisy can never be agreeable to an elevated mind. Hypocrisy mouthed by a swaggering drunkard who cares nothing for Mr. Brummell’s dicta concerning clean linen, soap, and hot water is not only disagr
eeable but unaesthetic. Catherine was disgusted. She would have hastened to Lord Rand’s defense—all in a perfectly commendable battle against hypocrisy, of course—if she had not recalled Miss Fletcher’s remarks about tempering justice with a dash of common sense.
Catherine had to content herself with a show of shocked dismay. She even managed to thank Lord Browdie for his kindly meant warnings. When the ordeal was over, she searched among the crowd of faces for Lord Rand, but he was nowhere to be seen. The supper dance began, bringing Mr. Langdon to her side, full of apologies for his friend’s sudden departure and hopes that Miss Pelliston would not be disappointed in his substitute.
Catherine told herself she was not in the least disappointed as she offered him a welcoming smile. Mr. Langdon’s company was always soothing, and now especially so, after the emotional turmoil of dealing with first a domineering, wild viscount and then an avuncular, unwashed libertine of a baron.
The only problem was that she wanted to unburden herself, to express her contempt for Lord Browdie’s pious humbug and her relief that it was only pious humbug instead of scorn and insult. Unfortunately, she could confide only in her partner in crime.
“There, Diana, did I not tell you?” said Lady Glencove bitterly. “He takes no more note of you than if you had been a stick of furniture. Which you might as well be, standing in one place the livelong night and never opening your mouth.”
“Yes, Mama.”
‘“Yes, Mama,’ she says—then does precisely as she wishes. Oh, was there ever such an undutiful daughter?” Lady Glencove dabbed her omnipresent handkerchief at her eyes.
“Mama, he is gone. I can scarcely run out of the house after him.”
“He would not be gone, you unnatural child, if you would make but the smallest effort. He admires your looks, for which you ought to be thankful. How many others do you think would want such an Amazon?” the countess complained, as though her daughter had deliberately grown to this abnormal height to spite her.
“My size is hardly my fault, Mama,” Lady Diana answered with a touch of impatience.
“It is your manner that concerns me. If he admires your looks, you should use the advantage. Instead you stand like a dumb statue and leave me to manage the conversation. You are not a stupid girl, Diana. Why must you let him think so?”
“I had not thought the gentlemen overly concerned with female intelligence—”
“He is,” the mama interrupted. “Instead of talking to you, he stays forever with that blue-stocking—and her papa a mere baron, while you are the daughter of Glencove. If he likes bookish women, you must contrive to appear so.”
“Oh, Mama!”
“Why not? She cannot be better educated than yourself.”
Lady Glencove studied the woman in question, who was conversing with Jack Langdon. “She cannot be so bookish as all that,” her ladyship went on, “or Argoyne would never go near her. Really, I do wonder what the men see in her. She is hardly an Incomparable.”
“She listens, Mama. I’d scarcely said three sentences to her before she asked whether I was as devoted to hunting as my namesake.”
Lady Glencove looked blank.
“She meant Diana, the goddess of the hunt. I said I enjoyed it immensely, and immediately she had a dozen questions for me. She is most knowledgeable, though she says the sport is not to her tastes. Her papa is famous for his hounds, you know.”
Lady Glencove discovered in these remarks something more promising than Lord Pelliston’s success in breeding hunting dogs. ‘Well, then, you and the girl have something in common. That is good.” Her voice became commanding again. “Unless you wish to break your mama’s heart, you will pursue the friendship.”
“I wish you would make up your mind, Mama. I thought it was Lord Rand you wanted me to pursue.”
The mother uttered an exasperated sigh. “How better than to be always in company with those he spends his time with? Really, Diana, I begin to believe you are stupid.”
“I am always stupid in Town, Mama. I cannot breathe here and I cannot think and—”
She was cut off.
“You are not going back to Kirkby-Glenham, young lady, so just put that out of your mind. When I think of that person, my blood turns cold. But I will not think of him—and you know better than to do so, I trust. What you will do is form a closer acquaintance with Miss Pelliston.”
“Yes, Mama.”
Mr. Langdon was not accustomed to supping with debutantes. He liked women—worshipped them, in fact, but in the abstract and from afar. Up close they were problematic. His mother and sisters, for instance, were always pressuring him to marry, and marriageable women made him uneasy. He would always sense in them, after a few minutes, impatience, boredom, some vague irritation. He did not know how he provoked these reactions, but he had little doubt he did.
Catherine Pelliston was different. If he rambled off to ancient Greece or Renaissance Italy, she ambled along with him. No topic was too obstruse for her, and she never seemed to require that their conversation be interlaced with flirtation.
She was a kindred spirit, he thought. In his eagerness to pay tribute to the quiet pleasure she gave him, he piled her plate with enough tantalising sustenance to satiate a soldier after three days’ forced march.
“Oh, Mr. Langdon,” said Catherine with a small gasp, “are you trying to fatten me up too? If I eat but a fraction of this, you shall have to push me about the dance floor in a wheelbarrow.”
Mr. Langdon’s fingers promptly wrought their usual havoc with his hair. How could he be so boorish, so thoughtless? One did not offer young ladies buckets of food as though they were sows. His handsome face reddened as he watched his companion. She was studying her plate as though it were a mathematical problem.
She looked up with a consoling smile. “At least you don’t pretend young women live on air and nectar, like hummingbirds. All the same, I’m afraid you must come to my rescue.” So saying, she took his plate from him and began apportioning the contents of hers.
A few weeks earlier, Catherine had won the affection of an eight-year-old boy with one small gesture connected to food. Mr. Langdon might have two decades’ advantage of Jemmy, but his heart was equally susceptible. In a few words she had put him at ease again, and those words, like the gesture, were so fraught with overtones of domestic intimacy and tranquillity that he felt they’d been friends forever. She might have been his sister—except that any of those ladies, in like circumstances, would have either burst into tears at the imagined insult or cruelly ridiculed him.
He had no way of knowing that Catherine was accustomed to smoothing over difficulties—or at least constantly trying to do so. He knew nothing of the scenes she endured at her papa’s dinner table, and the quick thinking required to spare an oversensitive aunt’s feelings or distract a drunken parent from some disagreeable topic or behaviour. He did not know that she’d sensed his nervous embarrassment and had acted reflexively to remove it.
Jack knew only that he’d committed a faux pas. Since he’d exaggerated its importance, he likewise exaggerated the significance of her tactful response. Gazing at her with relief, he wondered if he was in love with her.
“How kind you are,” he murmured as he took his place beside her. “I should know better, of course—my sisters will never take more than a mouthful in public—but everything looked so tempting.”
“Yes, and all the burden of choosing is yours because you are the gentleman. Women are so difficult to please, are we not?” she asked with a faint twinkle. “If you’d left out something I fancied, I would sulk. You leave nothing out and I complain. But that is for appearances, you know,” she explained, dropping her voice confidentially. “The truth is, dancing makes me so hungry I probably could eat it all— and disgrace myself in Society’s eyes.”
The confiding tones made Mr. Langdon feel warm and cosy. He wished they could be engaged this minute, so that he might have the privilege of squeezing one of the gentle white hand
s that had touched his plate.
He made do with a smile as he replied, “That is because today’s modes are for sylphs. These Grecian costumes are meant for slender faeries—as you are, Miss Pelliston. If, on the other hand, this were the time of Rubens, you’d have to gorge yourself.”
He took up his silverware and took a turn into the early seventeenth century, where Miss Pelliston easily followed. He was soon lost there, oblivious to the rest of the company, and not even altogether conscious of his companion. He never noticed the occasional frown that furrowed her delicate brow.
Miss Pelliston’s partner in crime, meanwhile, was in the process of attempting burglary.
Some hours earlier, Max had made discreet inquiries regarding the baron. That is how he found out where Lord Browdie’s love nest was. The viscount was now standing in a dark alleyway, staring up at the windows of that house.
Clarence Arthur Maximilian Demowery, Viscount Rand, had in the course of his chequered career scaled any number of edifices. To climb the walls of this house was child’s play. He did not hesitate. He grasped a drainpipe, found a toehold between the bricks, and commenced to climb. In a few minutes he’d leapt over the wall of a narrow balcony and stood pressed against the side of the house near the French doors, listening.
He heard, as he’d expected, nothing. The house was dark. Obviously Lord Browdie’s mistress had taken advantage of his absence. Either she was out or she’d gone to bed early. Max would have preferred knowing precisely where she was, and if she slept, how soundly she did so, but a man cannot have everything he wants in this world.
He moved silently towards the doors and tried them. They were unfastened—why not? The citizens of London’s West End had a low opinion of burglars’ intelligence. Perhaps the ground floor was secured, which meant the front door and servants’ entrance were locked at night. Thieves obviously entered a house as everyone else did.
He quietly pushed the doors open and crept into the room. The interior being no darker than the alleyway, his eyes had already adjusted. In what dim light there was he could make out the outlines of furniture. His eyes sought a wardrobe and found it. His feet took him to it.