Enslaved (16 page)

“Not so pleasant for me.” She handed him the summons so he could read it himself.

Looking up, his face was nearly as pale as the vellum sheet. “Dear God, what next?”

Taking it back from him, she asked, “What does this mean? Surely any ruling by this so-called Vigilance Committee isn’t enforceable? Why waste time answering to a great lot of hypocrites? I’ve a mind to simply ignore it.”

Grim-faced, the theater manager shook his head. “I’m afraid it’s not that simple, m’dear. If you ignore them, they will organize a boycott of the play. Your career will be over before it has begun and the play will be called upon to close. No, you must answer the summons and find a way to ensure you’re exonerated of the charge. Perhaps you could speak to that clever barrister chap, Mr. Carmichael, and see what he recommends? I don’t like to think of replacing you but for the good of the theater, if I must, I must.”

Daisy entered the assembly rooms at Caxton Hall, Gavin by her side. Combing through the crowd, which must number several hundred, she wasn’t really surprised to see Isabel Duncan sitting front and center of the packed auditorium. Isabel sent a smirk her way and then settled back in her seat.

Gavin squeezed her hand. “Don’t let her rattle you.”

“How can I help it? I feel as though she has not only my career but the fate of Drury Lane in her palm.”

The seven-member committee of men and women sat about a square table except for the chairman who stood behind the podium, gavel at the ready. He called out, “Miss Daisy Lake, approach the platform, if you please.”

Daisy leaned into Gavin and whispered, “Wish me luck.”

“Just remember, you’re not alone. I’m here.”

She sent him a grateful smile. “Thank you.” Leaving him to take his seat, she walked down the aisle of chairs and mounted the platform steps.

“For the record, please confirm that you are Daisy Lake also known as Delilah du Lac.”

“Yes, I am she.” She carried herself with great dignity, Gavin thought.

Balding and sour-faced, the chairman lost no time in calling the session to order. “The character of Dame Twankey was part of the variety show performance at The Palace, was it not?”

Wondering what a female impersonator’s comic bit had to do with her, Daisy nodded. “Yes, that is true.”

“Would it surprise you to know that the actor, or rather impersonator, who fills that role is homosexual?”

Daisy took a deep breath. How different London was from Paris where acceptance of a spectrum of sexual preferences and lifestyles was widespread. She thought for a moment and then answered,
“As You Like It,
much admired among Shakespeare’s comedies, has the heroine, Rosalind, dressed in drag for most of the play. She even takes Ganymede as her alias, a veiled reference to a gelded horse or castrated young man. In Shakespeare’s time, as I’m sure you know, women were prohibited from acting onstage. Rosalind would have been played by a young man affecting to be a young woman disguised as a young man. Is that truly so different from the present day pantomime dames?”

Good show, Daisy.
Sitting out in the audience, Gavin felt his chest swell with pride.

The chairman moved on to the next question. “Miss Lake, in your previous variety hall act, you took Delilah du Lac as your stage name.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Doesn’t the name Delilah, the Biblical temptress who brings Samson to ruin, strike you as an overly suggestive name to take for the stage?”

Daisy appeared to give the question serious thought. Tapping a finger against the side of her cheek as she had when Gavin had first seen her onstage at the supper club, it was obvious to him she was playing to the crowd. “I suppose I wanted to
suggest
that people should have a good time.”

Titters traveled through the hall. Gavin tensed.
Have a care, Daisy.

Several more questions were asked and each time Daisy answered with wit, aplomb, and honesty. Gavin had never been more proud of anyone in his life. To answer the charge of whether her act qualified as “lewd and lascivious” she was asked to sing a song from her supper club repertoire. Remembering the seductive heat of that performance, Gavin held his breath. Even dressed demurely, he didn’t see how she could possibly carry it off.

“I should like to sing two songs, actually.” There was a piano onstage. Facing out to the audience, she asked, “Does anyone here play?”

When no hands went up, Gavin reluctantly raised his. “I play a little.”

Smiling, she beckoned him up onstage, putting him in mind of that first night at The Palace. What a long time ago that seemed.

Opening the portfolio she’d brought along, she handed him the sheet music. “This one first,” she said, pointing to the score for a naughty number, “A Little of What You Fancy.”

“Are you certain?” he asked.

She nodded. Flipping through, she marked her second selection. “Play this one last.” It was the imminently respectable drawing room ballad, “Come into the Garden, Maud.”

Hoping she had a method to her apparent madness, Gavin took the sheet music and slipped behind the piano. Taking a deep breath, he began to play the raunchy burlesque number she selected.

She sang the racy song standing wooden as a statue and with a perfectly straight face. Afterward, she sang the ballad in such a seductive manner that, glancing out onto the audience, Gavin saw several men pull out handkerchiefs and mop their dripping brows.

The staid audience exploded in a fit of clapping. Smiling, Daisy dipped into a curtsy.

“You’ve made your point, Miss Lake.” The chairman knocked his gavel, calling for order. “The complaint against Miss Daisy Lake is hereby dismissed.”

“O, thou didst then ne’er love so heartily!
If thou remember’st not the slightest folly
That ever love did make thee run into,
Thou hast not loved …”
—W
ILLIAM
S
HAKESPEARE
, Silvius,
As You Like It

W
ith the Vigilance Committee business behind them, Gavin felt in a celebratory mood. His flat lay within walking distance of his office at the Inns of Court. When his client’s trial was canceled at the last minute, he set his course for home, hoping he’d find a certain cinnamon-haired actress indoors. He didn’t think Daisy had a rehearsal today. Even better it was Wednesday, the day Jamison took the train to Richmond to visit his ailing mother. He and Daisy would have the flat to themselves. They needn’t confine themselves to the bedchambers but could make love in any room they pleased. The circumstances were perfectly aligned for a rainy afternoon spent in the most pleasant of ways. Only a fool would pass up such an opportunity.

That wasn’t to say he didn’t have stacks of legal briefs, depositions, and sundry client files gathering dust on his desk, for certainly he did. No matter how many hours he put in, there seemed to be an endless stream of lost souls in need of defending. But since Daisy’s reentry into his life, work no longer occupied the epicenter of his universe. He was coming to suspect he used reading the law as a means for avoiding living altogether.

But such weighty introspections were best kept for another time and place, not when any minute now he would have a warm, willing woman in his arms. He entered the flat, stopping only long enough to shake out his umbrella and set his briefcase down inside the door. “Daisy, darling, I’m home.”

He stripped off his soaked outer coat and tossed it over the back of a chair, too impatient to bother with hanging it up. When she still hadn’t emerged to greet him, he went room to room calling her name. The last room he came to was hers. She still kept actor’s hours, which meant she liked to stay up well into the night and then sleep well into the morning. On those days when a session with her acting coach or some other commitment forced her to rise early with the rest of the workaday world, she sometimes took a rest in the afternoon. Wondering if she might be napping now, imagining the myriad ways he might go about waking her, he felt himself growing hard. He gave the perfunctory knock and when she didn’t answer went inside anyway.

The room, including the unmade bed, was empty, leaving him to face the fact that fortune had not favored him as he’d hoped. It was a rare day he could break away and come home and the one time he had she’d gone out on some errand or appointment. Ah, well, that was life. A brisk walk back in the chilling drizzle would take care of the desire weighing between his legs, at least for the time being. Though he missed out on “lunch,” there was always supper to which he might look forward, or rather the interval afterward. On second thought, hang supper. Who needed beefsteak and jacket potatoes when one could dine on ambrosia of sweet lips and silken skin?

Wondering if a perpetual state of lust wasn’t bringing his brain to a state of mushy rot, he turned to go. He hesitated at the door, oddly unwilling to leave just yet. She’d occupied the room only a few weeks, and yet its four walls bore the indelible imprint of her presence as if she’d been its inmate for a year or more. Breathing in her scent, he found himself loath to leave. He must be far gone in love indeed for he found himself roaming the room, touching the things she recently touched—her pillow, which still bore the imprint of her head, the chased silver hand mirror and brush on her dresser, the latter’s bristles threaded with a few cinnamon-colored strands of her hair, a dog-eared copy of
As You Like It
with her notes to herself scribbled in the margins. Wondering how she was coming along, he reached down to pick up the play when his gaze alighted on a folded sheet of cream-colored vellum covered with what looked to be the beginnings of a letter. He spotted the Paris direction and his heart fell.

A few weeks before he would have found the strength to let the thing lie where it was and leave the room. But that was before. Having Daisy in his life had taught him how susceptible he was to temptation in all its many forms. He picked up the letter and sat down with it on the edge of the bed.

My dearest darling Freddie,

London is a large, crowded city like Paris and yet so very unlike Paris I would risk running out of ink and paper if I attempted to write down all the many differences. People behave very properly here and even the nicer ones are more than a bit stiff. God willing, you will see it for yourself soon enough. In the meantime, my heart yearns to hear news of you. I want to know every thing you’ve been thinking and doing since I left you. The other day I counted and realized more than a month had passed since I last held you in my arms, and yet it feels like a year.

The letter, or at least what was so far written of it, ended there. Still it was enough to tell him that whoever Freddie was, he held Daisy’s heart in the palm of his hand. Balling the missive into a tight fist, Gavin cursed himself for a fool. He’d been going about with his head in the clouds as if he were the love struck swain, Silvius, in that damned Shakespearean play Daisy was studying, and yet by her own admission she’d been counting the days until she could be with her Freddie again—and free of him. Should he really be surprised? Reviewing her recent behavior, not only the things she’d said and done but more importantly those she hadn’t, he decided not. She as good as admitted the rumors about her didn’t lie, that she’d been with men in France and not only a few. Not once had she made him so much as a single promise. Far from it, she was the one who insisted on limiting the terms of their living arrangement to one month in the first place. Now he knew why. Her lover was coming from Paris to join her and once their reunion was a
fait accompli,
she would have no more need of him. She would walk out of his life with nary a backward glance.

Possibly the worst part of the whole dismal affair was that Daisy hadn’t lied to him, not really. Any lying that had taken place was by him. From the moment they’d shaken hands on their “arrangement,” he’d done little else but deceive himself that once the agreed-upon month was past, he would have won her over. The passion between them had gone a long way in fermenting the lie. Even now when he was holding the black-and-white proof in his hand, he still couldn’t wrap his mind about the humbling truth that she was already making plans to leave him for another man.

But there was one bittersweet pleasure left to him—confronting her and tossing the evidence of her duplicity back in her face. Wherever it was she’d gone off to, she had to return home eventually, and when she did she would find him ready and waiting. Who knew but if his acting abilities held out—and all lawyers had a touch of the thespian in them—he might try making her believe that he didn’t give a damn, that he, too, was looking forward to being free.

If only he might convince himself as well.

When Daisy walked in from rehearsal late that afternoon, Gavin was sitting on the serpentine-backed parlor sofa apparently waiting for her. Despite the drizzling weather, she was in a fine mood. The run-through had gone splendidly and afterward she’d even done some shopping. When she came upon the blue felt bonnet trimmed with a black velvet band displayed in the window of a Mayfair millinery, she thought,
Freddie will adore this,
and that had settled it.

And now she’d come home to find Gavin waiting. She hadn’t even slipped off her cloak and already she was wet for him. Anticipating several hours of uninterrupted lovemaking, she set the bandbox down and came over to kiss him. “What a lovely surprise.”

He pulled back. “It’s been quite a day for surprises all around.” He slammed his half-finished drink down on the table and stood.

Taking in his hard gaze, set jaw, and caustic tone, she gathered he was in a mood. “Gavin, whatever is the matter?”

“Who the devil is Freddie? Or should I say your ‘dearest darling Freddie'?”

“I … I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she lied, though not very convincingly. The tremble in her voice must be a dead giveaway.

Not wanting to meet his eye, she dropped her gaze and spotted the crumpled vellum in his fist. It took her a handful of seconds before it dawned on her just what it was he held. He’d found her half-finished letter to Freddie, the one it had never occurred to her to hide.

She lifted her chin and forced her gaze up to his, confident her face must appear as angry as his. “That is my private post. You had no right to read it, even less to rifle my room.”

“I wasn’t rifling your room. I came home early to make love to you. When you didn’t answer my knock, I thought you must be napping and went inside, hoping to surprise you. Instead, I was the one who received the surprise in coming across this.” He raked his gaze over her as though she were some creature, some
monster,
whose heinous motives he could scarcely fathom. “My God, Daisy, it wasn’t as though you went to the trouble, or some might say the
decency
of hiding it.”

“I didn’t think I had to.” She pinned him with a pointed look as though he were the one of them in the wrong.

In typical female fashion, she’d somehow managed to turn the tables on him and put him on the defensive—so much for his supposedly brilliant legal brain. When dealing with Daisy, soft emotion, not flinty logic, seemed to rule the day.

“I wouldn’t have found the bloody thing if you hadn’t left it sitting out with your script.” Even with the evidence of her subterfuge in hand, it felt important she not think he stooped to going through her things. “I could almost believe you meant for me to find it and catch you out.”

The barb hit home. Cheeks as bright pink as if he had slapped her, she said, “I don’t have to justify my life to you, Gavin, or anyone else. As for our arrangement, I mean to pay you back every farthing you’ve spent on the acting lessons and the books and, well, all of it. It will take me a while, years I expect, but some day I will repay you.”

Good God, she must be a cold-blooded creature to bring up the terms of their arrangement at a time such as this. She’d stolen his heart. Compared to that, what did he care for a few hundred pounds?

“I don’t want money from you. Whatever help I’ve given you has been out of … friendship.” He almost said love but stopped himself before he did and made himself look even more of a fool.

She shook her head, mouth pressed into a firm line. “I don’t want you to think of me as your mistress or yourself as my keeper. Whatever we’ve done together in bed, whatever pleasure I’ve given you, I’ve done so of my own free will. I want you to think of our time together as a gift, not a business arrangement.”

“I believe the fashionable term is ‘protector’ and I thought, hoped, to be more to you than that. What we had was never a business arrangement, not to me, but it hardly matters now. You and this … Freddie … have you some sort of understanding?” He despised himself for asking, and yet he quite simply had to know.

She shifted her gaze away. “I suppose you could call it that.”

“What would you call it?”

She whipped her head about and met his gaze head on. “Love, Gavin. I call it love.”

“I see. You love this … Freddie. And yet you let me make love to you. No, not let me, seduced me, made me so mad for you I’m all but your slave. What was the point of it all?”

She had the effrontery to shrug. “A month is a long time to sleep alone. I wanted you. You wanted me. If we choose to barter our bodies, why shouldn’t we? We’re both adults. Where’s the harm?”

“Damn it, Daisy, when I came to your bed, it wasn’t just to fuck you. It was to make love. I thought we were making love.”
I thought we were falling in love. At least I was.

“Men and women share their bodies all the time without involving love. Matters go off a good deal more smoothly without adding messy emotions to the mix, or so I’ve always found.”

The latter allusion to all the other men in her life wasn’t lost on him. Whoever Freddie was, he was hardly her first lover and, the steamy letter aside, Gavin was coming to think he wouldn’t be her last, either.

Hurt beyond his wildest imagining, he rounded on her. “What are you so bloody afraid of? That we might be happy together, that I might actually love you?”

The questions rattled her, he could tell. She backed away, not because she was frightened of him—she must know by now he’d never harm her—but because he suddenly must have become a mirror for all the things about herself she didn’t want to see.

“That’s ridiculous. I’m not afraid of anything.”

“Then prove it. Let me come with you when you tell this Freddie of yours it’s over between you.”

She shook her head, expression resolute. “I’m sorry, Gavin, truly I am. Hurting you was the very last thing I set out to do. You’ve been good to me. More than good, you’ve been the soul of generosity. I’m very grateful—”

He cut her off with a wave of his hand. “I’m not interested in your gratitude.”