Well, all right, it was past three in the morning. Still, Sara never got to bed before five. And he ought to know. He was the one who’d been keeping her awake these past few weeks.
But when the door finally did open, it wasn’t the rouged and powdered face of his mistress that peered out at him, but rather the well-scrubbed and country-fresh face of her maid, Lilly, who said, blinking and rubbing her eyes with rather more astonishment than Burke thought the occasion warranted, “Oh! My lord! It’s you!”
“Yes, Lilly,” Burke said, more patiently—and more kindly—than he actually felt. “Of course it’s me. Who were you expecting, may I ask? Father Christmas?”
“Oh, no, my lord,” Lilly said, glancing back over her shoulder, into the darkened apartment. “Of course not. Not Father Christmas, no. Only not you, either. I didn’t think … I didn’t think we’d be seein’ your lordship. Not tonight.”
“Why not tonight, Lilly? Has Mrs. Woodhart taken ill, or something?”
“Oh, no, sir. Only, when your lordship never turned up at the theater—”
“Yes?”
“Well, we just thought we wouldn’t be seein’ you tonight, is all.”
“Well,” Burke said. “You were wrong. Here I am. Now, are you going to let me in, Lilly, or am I to stand out here in this drafty hallway all night?”
Again, Lilly looked back over her shoulder. “Oh, well, of course you can come in … only Mrs. Woodhart, she’s asleep, you know.”
“I assumed as much, Lilly. But I don’t think she’ll mind if I wake her.”
Burke didn’t feel he was flattering himself. The velvet box in his coat pocket was his insurance that Sara would not, indeed, at all mind being awakened in the middle of the night—and especially not by Burke Traherne. He had meant to give her the bracelet next month, on her birthday, but thought perhaps to see his jeweler about designing a matching necklace and earrings instead. Diamonds, he had learned over the years, were the surest way to a woman’s heart.
“We-ell,” Lilly said, stretching the word out to several syllables. “Could you wait, sir, while I see if I can wake her, first? She was feelin’ a bit poorly when she come in …. Plus you know she always wants to look ’er best for ye ….”
Burke said, very slowly, so she’d be sure to understand him, “Why, certainly I’ll wait, Lilly. But would it trouble you terribly to allow me to wait inside?”
Lilly nodded, but admitted him with obvious reluctance, and only agreed to light a lamp when Burke settled himself onto a couch in the manner of a man who owned the right to. Which of course, he did, since he was the one paying the rent on the apartment. He had paid for the couch, as well.
He was, Burke decided, going to have to speak to Sara about her Lilly. Lord knew, it wasn’t easy to find good help these days—Miss Pitt was a prime example. Still, the girl was positively obtuse. Perhaps Lady Chittenhouse could recommend a good ladies’ maid. Burke could make out as if he were asking for Isabel ….
Burke sat in the semi darkness, glowering to himself. The mere thought of Miss Pitt nearly sent him into an apoplexy of rage. It was all that old woman’s fault. If she hadn’t given her notice at the last minute like that, he might have avoided spending the majority of his evening arguing with Isabel. Arguing with her? Who was he trying to fool? He’d spent the majority of the evening chasing after her. His new breeches—not to mention his shoes—were ruined from the mud through which he’d splashed in his mad dash after her when she’d slipped from the carriage. The two of them had been forced to return to the house to change before they dared show their faces at Lady Peagroves’—which, much to his chagrin, he’d found exactly as that irritating young woman on the street had assured him it would be, a crush filled with hangers-on and country cousins. Not an eligible fellow in the place.
Well, they were all eminently eligible. That was the problem. There wasn’t a fellow there with whom he’d feel safe entrusting Isabel to dance, let alone marry. Everyone who was anyone, another glum-faced father had assured him, was at Dame Ashforth’s.
Well, how was he to have known? A man couldn’t be expected to know things like that. That’s what he’d hired the chaperone for. Was it his fault that chaperones appeared to be, as a breed, stupid as cats? Besides, he’d come to the conclusion that it wasn’t a chaperone he needed for Isabel: it was a bloody long-distance runner. The girl had led him on a merry chase, all through Piccadilly. He’d finally caught her at Trafalgar Square, and only because she’d stopped running to catch her breath, and her white dress had given her away amidst all the whores and flower sellers.
And what had she done when he caught up with her? Laughed! Laughed as if the whole thing were nothing, a merry joke.
A joke! And then he’d had to spend the rest of the evening listening to Lady Peagrove apologize for the fact that there weren’t any peers at her cotillion this year, she couldn’t imagine where they’d all gone off to, and had Lord Wingate met her cousin Ann, wasn’t she lovely, widowed last year, too, poor thing, and stuck out all the way in Yorkshire with those three strapping boys and two hundred head of cattle and no man to keep the place.
Oh, yes. An excellent joke. It had been all Burke could do just to keep from flinging his champagne glass across the room.
Miss Pitt. It was all that Miss Pitt’s fault. If she hadn’t quit ….
And that girl. That girl with the umbrella. It was all her fault, as well. Her and her infernal mouth. Why, if she had kept that mouth of hers shut concerning the Peagroves’ cotillion ….
Was there an unwritten rule somewhere that chaperones and governesses had to let their tongues run away with them? Was that it? Perhaps he could find one whose tongue had been lost in some sort of tragic accident.
But how effective was a mute chaperone going to be at managing Isabel? He was quite sure he’d run through every last one of Lady Chittenhouse’s daughters’ chaperones, all of whom had had tongues, and none of them had been the least effective at managing his child. How was he to find another? Was he going to have to advertise? He supposed so. It would take days, and would require the endless questioning of pinch-faced widows and spinsters. And then he’d have to have their references checked, which would take more time. Especially if they’d lied
And they all lied.
This was not how a man in his prime—and Burke was, most decidedly, in his prime—ought to be spending his time. Between interviewing chaperones and making sure Isabel hadn’t snuck out of the house to meet the wretched Saunders—Lord, how Burke would have liked to put a bullet through that gadabout’s skull!—he hadn’t any time at all to himself. None at all.
It wasn’t any wonder Sara had gone to bed. Was he, truly, a man worth waiting up for?
What was he thinking? Of course he was!
Except … except that he couldn’t help thinking it was a bit strange, this going off to bed so very early. To his certain knowledge, actresses and songstresses tended to stay up until well into the wee hours, generally sleeping until afternoon. Sara had proven no exception to this rule. Well, she was put out with him, because he was so late. It wasn’t any wonder, really, that she’d gone to bed. She was a woman—quite emphatically a woman—and, like a woman, she’d taken offense at his tardiness. It was only to be expected, really.
That was when he noticed the boots.
They hadn’t really even made any attempt to hide them. Maybe Lilly hadn’t known they were there. Tucked into the shadows beside the long draperies that hid the French doors to Sara’s bedroom—the French doors through which Lilly had just disappeared—sat a tall pair of gleaming Hessians. Burke didn’t have to get up to see that they were clearly men’s boots, not a pair of Sara’s left carelessly lying about. Sara was a large woman, it was true, but not large enough to fit into a pair of boots which might have fit him.
On the couch, Burke sighed.
Really, this was getting to be too much. If he hadn’t known better, he might have begun to suspect that perhaps it was him. There had to be a reason all of these women found it so difficult to remain faithful to him. Was it really, as he’d been telling himself since that wretched evening he’d found Elisabeth and that blackguard O’Shawnessey locked in one another’s arms on the landing, that women were entirely fickle creatures, completely incapable of making a commitment?
Or could it possibly be that there was something wrong with him, something that drove women away? He’d been accused, in the past, of coldness, of having no heart. Was it possible that was true?
Quite probably. Elisabeth had seen to that. She had ripped whatever heart he’d once had out of his body and thrown it down the stairs that wintry night, sixteen years ago.
Which might have been why, just at that moment, it wasn’t hurting him a bit … though, considering those boots, it ought to have been.
The French doors were flung open, and the celebrated Mrs. Woodhart, resplendent in a diaphanous negligee he recognized as one he had purchased for her, stood in the lamplight, her midnight-black hair falling about her shoulders, almost down to her waist.
“Darling!” she cried, in the throaty voice that had made her the current toast of London. “There you are! Whatever kept you?”
Burke looked from the lovely creature in the doorway to the boots sitting not a foot away from her, but hidden in shadow, he supposed, from where she stood.
He said, simply, “Isabel.”
“Oh, no!” Sara shook her head. “Not again. What did she do this time? I hope it wasn’t that awful Saunders boy. You know, I hear, Burke, that he is thousands of pounds in debt up at Oxford. Gambling! There’s nothing quite worse than a gambler, except perhaps a gambler who can’t pay his debts, and I’m afraid that’s what our Mr. Saunders is.”
Burke had been sitting perfectly still. He had not yet shed his cloak, though he had removed his hat. Now he climbed to his feet.
“You are going to have to do something about that child of yours,” Sara said. She was not so large that she could look Burke in the eye when he’d risen to his full height, but she only had to tip her chin up a little to do so. At one time, he’d found the sight of Sara Woodhart’s up-turned chin quite charming. Tonight, however, he saw that the black beauty mark Sara painted onto the lower corner of her mouth was smeared, and there appeared to be a red mark on her throat, where the robe to the negligee opened to reveal the ivory skin of her neck.
“Honestly, Burke,” Sara was saying. “You allow her to run positively wild. You can’t let Isabel hold the reins. You have got to take charge of her, show her that you are in control.”
Burke began calmly stripping off his gloves, tugging on each finger individually.
“The problem with these chaperones you keep hiring,” Sara went on, not at all shrewishly—never shrewishly. That was part of Mrs. Woodhart’s charm—”is that they fear they’ll be dismissed if they don’t do precisely what the Lady Isabel says. You’ve got to find someone, Burke, who’ll put her foot down, and tell that girl exactly what’s going to happen to her if she continues to carry on hike a little hoyden.”
The gloves completely stripped off now, Burke said calmly, “Stand aside, Sara.”
Mrs. Woodhart seemed to remember herself suddenly. She said, with a tremulous little laugh, “Oh, Burke. Didn’t Lilly tell you? I’m afraid I’ve a tickle in my throat. I went straight to bed, after drinking a gallon of tea with honey. You’d best not come too close, love, or you might catch it. Dr. Peters says I’ve got to rest my voice, or I’ll be good for nothing for tomorrow night’s show.”
Burke slapped the black leather gloves against his palm. He wasn’t in a hurry. He had all the time in the world.
“Stand aside, Sara,” he said again. “There’s something I’ve got to do, and then I’ll be on my way, and you can get your rest.”
Sara glanced over her shoulder, into the darkened bedroom behind her. “Honestly, Burke,” she said, a little too loudly. “I can’t imagine why you’d want to go into the bedroom, when I told you before I’m not feeling my best—”
“There is something,” Burke replied unhurriedly, “that I left behind, last time I was here.”
Sara turned back toward him, and raised her perfectly molded shoulders in a slight shrug. “Have it your way,” she said, in the you-get-what-you-deserve tone she generally reserved for the young men who developed frostbite hanging about the stage door in hopes of catching a glimpse of her.
Burke said tersely, “Thank you.” As he brushed past her, he got a sudden whiff of Sara’s perfume, a concoction she and a local chemist had come up with and hoped to market as the personal scent of London’s greatest thespian. They intended to call the brew Sara. It reminded Burke, strangely enough, of the honeysuckle that had grown outside the stables in which he’d stalled his horse as a boy. Since this was not an unpleasant memory, he quite liked the odor, but wondered sometimes if the horsey undertone was purposeful on Sara’s part.
Inside the bedroom, all was dark, except for the faint red light thrown by the dying fire. The great canopied bed was empty, though clearly two heads had been resting against those pillows just moments earlier. Sara, never the neatest of women, had left her garments scattered about the floor. Burke could detect no men’s clothing in amongst the garters and crinolines and satin slippers.
Then he noticed a shadow outside the French doors to the terrace. The moon had managed to burn a hole through the fog, and he’d distinctly seen an elbow on the other side of the glassed-in door.
Burke strode toward the doors, and laid both hands upon the latches. Behind him, Sara gasped, and he heard Lilly say, quite distinctly, “Oh, mum!”
He flung open the doors. There, shivering in the spring chill, stood a man with one leg in, and one leg out, of a pair of breeches. He froze—quite literally—when he saw Burke, his eyes going wide as eggs. As Burke stood there, thinking that he didn’t know this fellow, but that that wasn’t so unusual, since there were lots of people he didn’t know in London, the man tore his gaze from Burke’s and looked, just once, down, over the balcony railing, to the street several stories below.
And gulped, quite audibly.
Burke laughed, though without any humor. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not going to throw you off it.”