Quentin was very foxed, with the clear confidence and muddied judgment of several hours of heavy drinking behind him. He carried her fingers to his lips and kissed them fervently.
“Run away with me, Joanna!”
“Run away with you? Are you mad? I thought only this morning you were planning the conquest of Lady Carhill?”
“I was,” Quentin said, turning her hand palm up and kissing the inside of her wrist. “But my present mistress must be discharged first. To run away with you again now would infuriate her. Perhaps then she would release me from her clutches?”
Joanna choked back a small, bitter laugh. “I had no idea that being a rake was so complicated.”
“Yes, it’s delicious. Never take a lover who’s not English, Joanna. Damn it if you aren’t too good for Fitzroy! Don’t let him destroy you as he’s destroyed the others!” Quentin pulled her into his arms. “Leave him, why don’t you? He’s more the devil’s disciple than I am.”
A man spoke from the shadows in a voice as biting as a winter wind in a graveyard.
“Last time we had true love in a tavern. Is it now to be a cuckolding in the corridor?”
Joanna spun about to see Fitzroy staring soberly at her as she stood wrapped in his brother’s embrace. Lady Reed was nowhere to be seen.
“It’s only solace,” Quentin said, releasing her. “What the devil did you mean by what you said to me this morning? If you must insist on such public neglect of your wife, the horns will no doubt sprout quickly enough.”
“For God’s sake, go away, Quentin!” Fitzroy seemed only infinitely weary. “I don’t think Joanna can take much more.”
Quentin stared at him for a moment, then with a wobbly bow to Joanna, left them.
Fitzroy stalked up to her.
As the light caught his features she felt her heart catch. Her artist’s eye pierced his cool control to the turmoil beneath.
Like the vampire,
Joanna thought suddenly,
caught out in the open at dawn—on the edge of dissolution—eyes reflecting an incredulous shock and an infinite regret. While I stand here in my made-over wedding dress, feeling sorry for myself. What, what is happening?
“Joanna, I have nothing to say but that I am most deeply, sincerely sorry for this whole shabby business. You shouldn’t have come, but I knew of no way to avoid it without causing even more comment. May I take you home?”
The quietness in his voice frightened her, for it threatened to disarm her completely. It would be easier to cope with that bitter, sarcastic man who had first surprised her with Quentin.
She turned away from him, lifting her chin.
“It would be the most convenient way to avoid more scandal, wouldn’t it? Is my public humiliation to be on a regular basis, or just every Friday?”
He caught her arm and turned her to face him. “Why Friday?”
“It doesn’t matter. Perhaps I didn’t quite understand our bargain when we made it, but I did promise not to interfere in your life. Bed any woman you please. Why not a new one each week? It’s nothing to me.”
His face was set, rigid. “Who told you?”
“Lady Carhill. Oh, fiddlesticks! I’m more than ready to leave.”
Fitzroy snapped his fingers for a servant and ordered the carriage. A few minutes later he helped his wife into the plush interior in silence. To Joanna’s astonishment, he slid an arm around her shoulders and pulled her against the warm strength of his body.
“There aren’t apologies enough in the language, Joanna. But I’m sorry that Lady Carhill chose to take out her frustrations on you. None of this is your fault.”
Joanna lay enfolded, dry-eyed, his heart beating steadily beneath her cheek.
She felt angry, and wretched, and filled with miserable indignation. But his mouth against her hair left her mesmerized, drowning her sorrow and her hurt in a sea of longing.
* * *
“Well?” The word conveyed an exquisite archness of tone. “And how was he, our puissant Fitzroy Mountfitchet?”
Lady Reed looked up, her face pale. Her red hair was a little disordered, as if carelessly bundled back into its pins. Her friend wafted her fan idly, the large sapphire on her finger catching the candlelight in a blaze of blue fire. The two women sat alone in a private parlor away from the noise and bustle of the ball.
“Glorious,” she whispered. “And incorrigible. Why did you suggest that he’d want to become my lover? Why? I did everything just as you said, and I know he desired me quite desperately. He’s a man, after all.”
“And yet?”
“In spite of everything I made him do, he didn’t seem humiliated, and he would not bed me. In the end he was merciless, in that cold, implacable way he has, mingled still with ineffable charm. I don’t know if he’s quite human. But it was as if some part of him weren’t even there, so that I had no power over him. While if he’d so much as snapped his fingers, I’d have licked his damn boots.”
The fan stopped moving for a moment, though candlelight still glittered on the ring.
“He
is
humiliated, Lady Reed, and the damage is sinking deeper every day. More deeply and more permanently than even he may think. Did you see the little wife, her eyes like saucers? He will hate himself, loathe himself, for doing this to her. This sudden marriage adds such a delicious piquancy to our game, don’t you think?”
“I don’t care about the game you’re playing. I just wanted him, that’s all, and I thought I could punish him a little for not similarly desiring me. That’s why I agreed to your demands, as well as it settling my gaming debt.”
“Indeed. So it has. Meanwhile, as an additional delight, we have Richard Acton waiting in the wings, not even aware that he has more than a walk-on part.”
“Why do you want to hurt him so much? All this seems a pretty savage revenge for some minor lapse of gallantry.”
The fan closed with a snap. The soft accent became more marked.
“A minor lapse? For God’s sake, for what he did in Spain, death would be too easy.”
But Lady Reed laid her red head on her arm and began to weep.
* * *
Joanna stared down at him, despising herself for wanting him to stay after what he had just done.
“You’re going out again? Now? It’s almost dawn. Why?”
They had not gone to her studio when they came back from the ball. Joanna could not paint. She had far too many strange emotions seething in her to do anything but go to bed and try to forget it all.
Her husband had brought her back to their house, escorted her to the door of her bedroom, and turned away. But he was not heading toward his own room. He was going back down the stairs that led onto the street outside.
Before she could stop herself, her deadly question slipped out into the silent hallway and hung over Joanna like the Sword of Damocles.
Fitzroy was instantly arrested. He stopped and turned around.
“Does it make a difference?”
She didn’t want to show so little pride, to open herself for another wound, but the words came out anyway, clipped and angry.
“Aren’t you going to explain?”
“I can’t. But not because it’s you doing the asking. Try to believe that. Nothing I do is a reflection on you. Try to sleep, Joanna.”
With an odd, crooked smile he picked up his hat and saluted her briefly, before he opened the front door and disappeared.
* * *
Fitzroy rode fast into town. It had been worse than he could have imagined with Lady Reed. Ugly, destructive, a travesty of everything he had ever felt or desired about women. The foulness of that shameless manipulation tasted like ash in his mouth, poisoning the blood.
It wouldn’t matter if he were the only one being damaged. But there was Joanna, with her brave defiance and unexpected compassion in the face of his outrageous behavior.
He hadn’t wanted to marry her, but she moved him more deeply than he could understand. All he wanted was the chance to find out why, to court her and discover more about her. Instead he was pursuing women he didn’t want, slaughtering his wife’s innocence and faith in the world.
This was worse, far worse, than Juanita.
Lord Grantley was in bed. His servant hesitated for only a moment before allowing Fitzroy into the house and sending a message up to his master.
Helen of Troy
was the password.
Half an hour later, Lord Grantley faced Fitzroy over a pot of coffee in his private study.
“This had better be urgent, Tarrant. I have a set of state functions today, and could have used my sleep.”
“Urgent?” Fitzroy glanced up, his voice ravaged by sarcasm. “I have just abandoned my new wife after a most edifying scene at Lady Reed’s ball. If I hated Joanna, I could not have done her more hurt. The honor I owe my name ought, at the very least, to demand discretion when I pursue other women. Instead, I have left her shattered by my public betrayal. Sadly, Lady Reed would have it no other way. But is it urgent? No, no more than usual. Yet I cannot go on.”
The older man’s glance was sharp, with very little compassion. “Pray, stick to the facts, sir.”
Fitzroy ran both hands back through his hair.
“Almost every day I get another of these mysterious missives. They send me on a wild-goose chase that ends in some minor humiliation or embarrassment of one kind or another. I’ve been halfway to the coast, for God’s sake, and to Buckinghamshire and back in a day. There’s absolutely nothing to show for my efforts but a steady exhaustion that’s beginning to eat at my bones.”
“And now you’ve received another?”
Fitzroy reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper.
“This is today’s mission, delivered by hand, though no one in my household saw the messenger. It will take me into Hertfordshire on another bloody fool’s errand. Yet I’m afraid to ignore it, in case this is the one that matters, or in case another death waits at the end, instead. The man who killed Green hanged himself, effectively closing that trail. But I’m no nearer to knowing who murdered Herring or Flanders. And there’s no hint of a plot against Wellington that I can discover.”
Lord Grantley dropped his lids over his eyes and leaned back in his chair.
“According to Herring’s message there won’t be, until you bed the right lady. I am to assume from your unfortunate state that it was not Lady Reed?”
Fitzroy looked up and laughed, with a wild, bitter undertone.
“It was not. Trojans and Greeks mean nothing to her. Yet it would seem that she is in on the game.”
“What game?”
“A game of cat and mouse. By God, what an apt expression! Have you ever watched a cat with its prey, Grantley, tossing and batting at a living creature? The mouse ends up in a paralysis of terror, longing for the final blow of the claws or bite to the jugular, only to be toyed with again and again.”
“What of it, sir? It’s the game we played in the Peninsula to force the French to give way, isn’t it?”
“But this time I am the mouse, and the cat is invisible, crouching somewhere in the dark. Lady Reed went much further than Lady Carhill. It was not pretty. But because she might have replied that Helen’s smile was only for Paris, I had to go along with it, whatever degradation I might feel, however dishonorable or vile my part in the play. And at last she let slip that she had been put up to it.”
Lord Grantley slammed his hand palm down on the table. “By whom?”
Fitzroy stood and began to pace, his hands clasped behind his back. When he stopped and turned to face the older man, he was smiling, an empty, courteous smile.
“She wouldn’t say. But I gather that a group of society ladies have made a little wager concerning me, as some kind of retaliation for the cruelties perpetuated on their sex by heartless rakes. If nothing else were involved, I would say the entire game is simply that, and that we shan’t find out anything sinister concerning the Iron Duke’s safety. No dastardly plots, no assassins, nothing but a few ladies suffering from ennui.”
“For God’s sake! Killing your men seems a very absolute way of revenging womankind on a rake.”
Fitzroy dropped back onto his chair and stared at his hands, pressed palm down on the table in front of him, the fingers spread.
“Exactly! Flanders, Herring, and Green, God rest their gallant souls! My men. Killed in spite of all the warnings and guards that I’ve tried to provide. And now my wife’s little sister, Lady Matilda Acton, used as a decoy to deliver another empty message. That’s why I dragged you from your bed, Grantley. I must tell Joanna what’s going on. Or I can’t go through with any more of this.”
Lord Grantley stood up, towering over Fitzroy. With the flat of his hand he gave the younger man a stinging blow across the face.
“That is not a challenge, sir, for you to meet me at dawn,” he hissed. “But a reminder that you have an obligation to do your damned duty. You will not go mewling to your wife. God knows how she might react, what she might give away!”
Fitzroy touched the fingers of his left hand to his jaw, knowing the skin had gone livid.
“Should I thank you? I cannot retaliate, of course. Our respective positions insure that. But no doubt it was deserved. I have done the same to more than one green soldier who threatened to lose his nerve before a battle.” He gave a wry grin. “Now I know how it feels.”
“I don’t question your nerve or your courage, Tarrant,” Lord Grantley said, leaning forward with an awkward commiseration, as if embarrassed that he had lost his temper. “But we cannot risk what might happen. The fate of Europe may be involved. Yet you think that this entire imbroglio could be personal, that it doesn’t need to involve Whitehall, that Wellington isn’t in danger?”
“I do.”
Lord Grantley drummed his fingers on the table top. “And I do not. I cannot take the risk that you’re wrong. You will continue with the charade, sir, in spite of your imprudent wedding. You will go to Lady Kettering’s affair and do whatever is asked of you. For God’s sake, it cannot be that hard to bed a pretty woman, and this marriage was arranged—was it not?—one of convenience.”
Fitzroy did not reply for a moment. Then he stood up and bowed.
“If I’m to ride to Hertfordshire today and be back in time to visit my sister, I must go home and change.”