One of the men started forward, dark eyes glinting in fury, but the woman held him back with nothing but a gesture. “Why should we clean for the likes of you?” she asked, her Italian different from Ghislaine’s, with a more liquid, sliding tone. Prettier, Ghislaine thought.
“For your own sense of pride, if nothing else,” she said firmly. “Even if your master does not care, we do. If you cannot make this house respectable, then we will find servants who can.”
“You cannot put us out on the streets,” the young man said hotly.
“I can put you out in the canal if I’ve a mind to,” Ghislaine said grimly, having accustomed herself to dealing with hostile underlings. “It is your choice to make. I would like you to start with the salon, scrubbing it down, carting away the rubbish. Next the kitchen, and we’ll need”—her pause was almost imperceptible—“three bedrooms. One for Mr. Taverner, one for Mr. Blackthorne, and one for me. All this must be accomplished by this evening. Is that understood?”
“Three bedrooms, signora?” The housekeeper’s black eyes stared into hers with contempt. “Would the two be adjoining?”
If she’d hoped to make Ghislaine blush, she had no idea with whom she was dealing. “I imagine Mr. Blackthorne can find me if he so desires,” she said flatly. “Perhaps we’ll start in the kitchens after all. I find I’m famished, but I certainly wouldn’t trust a meal prepared in a house that looks like this. Lead me to them.” She began rolling up the loose sleeves of her borrowed gown.
She’d managed to shock the housekeeper out of her countenance. “We’ll start…?” she echoed. “Perhaps I didn’t understand…”
“You understood. We will work together. I am no stranger to labor, and I despise filth. To the kitchens, signora.”
“I am called Luisa, signora,” the woman said, still obviously rattled. “This way, if you please.”
Ghislaine started after Luisa, the other servants falling in behind, moving past the astonished figure of Taverner. “Close your mouth, Tavvy,” she suggested sweetly. “There’s no telling what diseases you might pick up in this noxious air. Go find a market and bring us back some food.”
“But I haven’t got any Italian, Mamzelle,” he said, still obviously amazed that she did.
“You have money, do you not? That should suffice.” And she continued on, down into the bowels of the damp old house that laughingly styled itself a palace.
At one o’clock the next morning she smiled for the first time since they’d landed on the continent, since Nicholas Blackthorne had put his hands on her in earnest. While the house wasn’t clean from top to bottom, at least the main salon and the bedrooms were respectable. The kitchen had proven to be in decent shape, a fact which came as no surprise to Ghislaine. She had guessed that the decaying filth had been more of a protest against a foreign master than any real affection for squalor on the part of the servants.
She’d worked hard, nonetheless, side by side with the servants, scrubbing, cleaning, scouring, and when Tavvy returned with two baskets full of bread, fruit, rice, and fish, she’d set him to work as well, ignoring his loud complaints.
She was exhausted. Her body ached from the hard work; her soul rejoiced in it. They’d eaten a simple meal, all of them around a single scrubbed table, a meal that Luisa and Ghislaine had cooked together.
By the time the previously hostile young manservant, Guido, had carried buckets of steaming water up for her bath, and one of the maids had shyly offered clean bedclothes, Ghislaine had commanded their devotion. If it came to a battle between her and the foreigner who was paying their salaries, she had a good idea which side they would choose. The original state of the house was more than indicative of their contempt for those who held the purse strings.
The bath had been deep and blissfully hot.
She’d scrubbed herself, many times over; she’d even scrubbed her hair. The white night rail was made of heavy cotton, soft after many washings, and it covered her from her fingertips to her toes. As she climbed into the narrow bed in the small room they’d cleaned at the front of the house, she found herself smiling in peaceful pleasure.
The master bedroom had been prepared for Nicholas. His clothes were laundered and put away, the damp hangings on the huge bed shaken and aired in the evening air, the floors swept and scrubbed. Even spotlessly clean, the palace reeked of decay and dissolution. A fitting enough habitat for a decadent British rake.
Exhausted as she was, it was still a long time before she slept. Her body was weary, sated by the hard work and the steaming bath, yet she was restless, longing for something to ease her. It wasn’t until she was almost asleep that she realized with horror what she was missing. Nicholas.
The light in her room was murky, greenish when she awoke. She had no clock, could only guess that it was sometime past dawn. And that she was no longer alone in the tiny room she’d chosen for her own.
She opened her eyes. Nicholas was lounging in the one chair the room possessed, his legs stretched out in front of him, seemingly at ease. He was clothed entirely in black, and his features were in shadow, his hair falling long and disheveled about his face.
She expected no words of praise for her transformation of the house, and thankfully received none. He simply watched her for a moment, and the tension in the room grew.
“No,” he said finally, his voice soft and dangerous, and she didn’t bother to misunderstand him.
He rose, crossing the room, and reached out a hand to touch the prim white night rail. “Where did you get this?”
“One of the servants lent it to me.”
“You have no need to wear servants’ castoffs anymore. A modiste is coming by later this morning with several things that should be easily altered for you.”
“I won’t accept clothes from you…”
He leaned forward, a dangerous presence, and her words trailed off before his banked, incomprehensible rage. “You will accept what I choose to give you. Clothing, food, jewels if I so desire. Just as you accepted my body.”
“You gave me no choice.”
“Exactly. Remember that, if you will.” He straightened, moving away, and she might have imagined that moment of raw emotion. “We will be going out tonight. We’ve an invitation to the Marquise de Brumley’s rout, and we will attend.”
“You’ll take your prisoner?” she shot back, not ready to concede defeat.
His smile was cool in the morning light. “I’ll take my willing mistress. Suitably bedecked in fine clothes and jewels. I had a very successful night at the tables.”
She watched him leave. She didn’t want his fine clothes. She didn’t want his jewels. She didn’t want to be his whore.
But there was something she did want, something he couldn’t give away, because he no longer possessed it. His ability to love.
And she was seven times a fool to long for it.
Ghislaine hadn’t worn a dress of such quality in more than ten years. She had stood very still as Signora Bagnoli had measured her, pinned and tucked and murmured beneath her breath. She had made no demur when Nicholas sat sprawled in a chair and watched the proceedings. She neither knew nor cared what the dressmaker thought of a gentleman surveying the procedure. Most likely she was used to such things. She would have noticed no wedding ring on Ghislaine’s white fingers, and would have drawn her own conclusions. And she would have been right.
She glanced at herself in the mirror, holding very still. The servants had cleared the dressing room that adjoined the master bedroom, and Ghislaine had dressed in there, not willing to battle Nicholas. The dress was made of a deep rose silk, cut low across her bosom, accentuating what curves she possessed. There was nothing of a courtesan to the dress—it was suited to a dashing young matron. Her chestnut hair she arranged herself, finding her hands surprisingly, instinctively skillful. She wore the finest silk stockings on her legs and the most elegant lace undergarments, and the slippers on her feet were sewn with jewels. She stared at her reflection, at the quiet, beautiful young woman who stared back, and she wanted to weep.
It was a lie, all a lie. Where was the girl who’d sold her body to feed her brother? Where was the girl who’d killed the man who had brought her to such disgrace, who’d done her best to kill the other man she held responsible? Where was the woman who worked side by side with the bourgeoisie of Paris, the cook in the great English house? Where was Ellen’s friend? Where was the woman who’d lain silent and still beneath Nicholas Blackthorne?
There were all there; they were all vanished. The woman who stared back had a gentle mouth, soft eyes, and a yearning heart, and she didn’t know how much longer she could disguise that fact. Only the knowledge that he wouldn’t care enough to look too closely protected her.
She descended the stairs slowly, gracefully, knowing he was watching her out of unreadable eyes. His thin mouth curved in something close to a smirk, and he bent low over her hand, a mocking courtesy. “You quite astonish me, Mamzelle,” he murmured. “You only want some jewels to make the toilette perfect.”
She snatched her hand back. “I won’t wear your jewels.”
“You will do anything I tell you to do,” he said pleasantly, catching her wrist in his and pulling her back. She had no choice but to go, to stand perfectly still as he fastened a collar of brilliant diamonds around her slender neck. Her father had told her once that she should always wear diamonds. Apparently Nicholas shared the same taste. She wanted to scream.
“Now the effect is perfect,
ma mie,”
he murmured. “I’m afraid we shall have to travel by water to Lady Brumley’s palazzo. Oblige me by not being sick all over your lovely dress.”
He was trying to goad her into anger. But indeed, her anger had vanished, leaving only despair in its place. When she made no reply, he simply took her arm, leading her out into the cool night air with a deceptive solicitude.
The noise, the heat of the party overwhelmed her. The short gondola trip had done little to restore her equilibrium, and the sheer shock of having so many brightly clothed creatures chattering around her, a great many of them speaking in French, was almost more than she could bear. Her fingers dug into the dark-clothed arm of her escort, without her realizing it, and if he glanced her way with patent curiosity, she was too distraught to notice. She moved through the crowds in a daze, politely responding to Nicholas’s murmured introductions with a regal nod that somehow came as second nature, and it wasn’t until several hours had passed that she loosened her grip on his arm, took a deep breath, and decided she might very well survive. And then she turned, at Blackthorne’s prompting, and looked straight into the eyes of a man she’d hoped never to see again.
She didn’t know his name, other than that he was an English earl. He’d aged in the years since she’d seen him, and she’d only seen him by candlelight, through the haze of her own rage and terror. When she’d viewed him last he’d been lying on the floor of Madame Claude’s, knocked unconscious, the contents of a chamber pot adorning his lap. She had hoped she’d killed him.
He looked the same. The same wet, thick lips; pendulous cheeks; red-veined, bulbous nose. Even his eyes were the same; milky, pale, set in pouched skin. And they were as avid, as knowing as ever.
“This your little ladybird, Blackthorne?” the man murmured, coming close enough so that Ghislaine could smell his perfumed, overheated flesh.
If she hadn’t been so distraught she would have realized Nicholas had no use for the man. “Mademoiselle de Lorgny,” he said in a bored, correct voice, “may I present the Earl of Wrexham?”
“We’ve met,” Wrexham said cheerfully, licking his thick pink lips.
She struggled for calm. “Monsieur must be mistaken,” she said, her voice raw and pained, giving her away, to Nicholas if to no one else.
“Nonsense, I never forget a face. Or a body, for that matter,” he said jovially. “I’m not one to hold a grudge, however. I’ve thought about you every now and then during the last few years. Wondered what happened to you. Madame Claude was fit to be tied, of course. Made it up to me, don’t you know. But there was no one to compare with you. It’s not often one gets a virgin.”
Nicholas was saying something to him, in his soft, cutting voice, but Ghislaine was too distraught to take it in. She turned away blindly, but Nicholas caught her arm, holding it tightly, moving her slowly across the room.
“You aren’t going to turn and run,
ma mie?”
he murmured under his breath. “I wouldn’t think you’d wish to give the gossips that much ammunition.” There was nothing she could say to him, no response she could make. She moved with him, barely conscious of her surroundings, as he escorted her from the crowded room, pausing with him as he took his leave of his hostess, waiting with numb patience as he did all that was proper.
The gondola moved in silence through the dark waters of the canal. He sat across from her, saying nothing, and for the first time the sickness of her soul overcame her seasickness. Her mind had stopped, unable to race ahead to the next few minutes, even the next few days. She tried to consider whether this revelation about her might force him to release her, but she found no pleasure in the notion, no despair. Everything was a blank.
The servants had retired for the night. There was no sign of Taverner when they entered the hallway, no sign of anyone. “Go upstairs,” he said, the first words he’d spoken to her since they left the party. “I’ll follow in a moment.”
She wanted to turn and throw herself at his feet, begging him to forgive her for what was not her fault, for what had been his fault. She realized with shock that that was how far her foolish love had taken her. She moved away from him without a word, her back stiff and straight, and began ascending the stairs.
Nicholas watched her go. Watched her narrow back, so straight, so delectable in the soft swirl of the rose silk gown. He walked into the darkened salon, moving to the far end of the room to stare out at the moon-silvered canal. He had to be very careful. Fury beat so strongly in his veins that he felt as if he might shatter. He wanted to kill. He needed a moment to clear the red-hot blindness from his eyes before he touched her.