More than a Mistress/No Man's Mistress (16 page)

She would remain for every moment of the evening behind the closed door of her room, Jane thought, clasping her hands very tightly in her lap.

“Tell me,” the duke said, “do you possess any garment more becoming than that atrocity you are wearing and the other one you alternate with it, Miss Ingleby?”

No. Oh, no. Definitely not. Absolutely, without question not.

“I will not need it,” she said firmly. “I am not going to be one of your guests. It would be unfitting.”

His eyebrows arched arrogantly upward.

“For once, Miss Ingleby,” he said, “we are in perfect accord. But you have not answered my question. Do take that mulish look off your face. It makes you look like a petulant child.”

“I have one muslin frock,” she admitted. “But I will not wear it, your grace. It is unsuited to my employment.”

“You will wear it tomorrow evening,” he informed her. “And you will do something prettier with your hair. I will find out from Barnard which of the maids is most adept at dressing hair. If there is none, I will hire one for the occasion.”

Jane was feeling somewhat sick to her stomach.

“But you have said,” she reminded him, “that I cannot be one of your guests. I will not need a muslin dress and an elaborate coiffure to sit in my room.”

“Do not be dense, Jane,” he said. “There will be dinner and cards and conversation and music—provided by a number of the ladies I am inviting. All ladies are accomplished, you know. It is a common fallacy among mothers, it seems, that the ability to tinkle away at a pianoforte keyboard while looking suitably decorative is the surest way to a man's heart and fortune.”

“I wonder,” she said, “what has made you so cynical.”

“Do you?” He smiled in that wolfish way of his. “It comes of growing up with an earl's title and the rank of a marquess, Jane. And of becoming a duke at the tender age of seventeen. Time and again I have proved myself to be the blackest-hearted villain in all England. But every mama with a marriageable daughter still fawns over me as if I were the Angel Gabriel, and every papa courts my acquaintance. Not to mention the simpering young maidens themselves.”

“One of these days,” she said tartly, “you are going to fall in love with one of those maidens only to discover that she will laugh your courtship to scorn. You have little respect for female intelligence, your grace. You believe yourself to be the greatest matrimonial prize in Christendom and therefore despise all those whom you
believe to be angling after you. There are
some
sensible ladies in this world, I would have you know.”

He pursed his lips again, a gleam of definite amusement in his eyes now. “For my pride's sake, Jane,” he said, “might we extend that to include the Islamic world as well as just Christendom?”

He was quickly learning, Jane thought, how to burst her bubble.

“But we digress.” He looked at her more soberly, and Jane felt fingers of apprehension creep up her spine. “You, Miss Ingleby, are going to be the main attraction of the evening. You are going to sing for my guests.”

“No!” She stood up abruptly.

“Ah yes,” he said softly. “I will even accompany you. I believe I must have admitted to the
ton
from time to time that I dabble. I do not fear that my manhood will be in jeopardy if I merely accompany a vocalist. Do you believe I should?”

“No,” she said. “No to the whole thing, I mean. I will not do it. I am not a public performer and have no wish to be. You cannot make me and do not think you can. I will not be bullied.”

“I will pay you five hundred pounds, Jane,” he said softly.

She drew breath to continue and snapped her mouth shut again. She frowned.

“Five hundred pounds?” she said incredulously. “How ridiculously absurd.”

“Not to me,” he said. “I want you to sing in public, Jane. I want the
beau monde
to discover what I discovered last night. You have a rare talent.”

“Do not think to flatter me into agreeing,” she said. But her mind had already whirled into motion. Five hundred
pounds. She would not need to work for a long time. She could disappear into a more secure hiding place than this house. She could even move away to somewhere the earl and the Bow Street Runners would not think of looking.

“Five hundred pounds would free you from the necessity of searching out instant employment, would it not?” he said, obviously reading her thoughts, or at least some of them.

But first she would have to face a houseful of guests. Was there anyone in London, she wondered, apart from the Earl of Durbury, who knew her real identity, who had ever set eyes on her as Lady Sara Illingsworth? She did not believe so. But what if there
were
someone?

“I will even say please, Jane,” the Duke of Tresham said, his voice falsely humble.

She looked reproachfully at him. Was there even the remotest chance that the earl would be among the guests? There was one way of finding out, of course. She could ask Mr. Quincy if she could look at the guest list.

“I will think about it,” she told him while her stomach performed an uncomfortable flip-flop.

“I suppose,” he said, “that is the best I can expect from you for now, is it, Jane? You cannot capitulate too soon or it will seem that you have allowed yourself to be overpowered. Very well. But your answer must be yes. My mind is set upon it. We will do some rehearsing tomorrow afternoon.”

“You are rubbing your leg again,” she said. “I suppose you will not admit that you were foolish to go out today and more foolish to stay out so long. Let me call someone
to help you up to your room, and let me have some cold water sent up to you.”

“I have been attempting to teach my brother to distinguish the front end of a horse from the rear,” he said. “I have wagered a hefty amount on him at White's, Miss Ingleby, and am quite determined that he will win the race.”

“How terribly foolish men are,” she said. “Their minds are totally bent on trivialities, their energies spent on matters of insignificance. If Lord Ferdinand is hurt on Friday, you will perhaps realize that he is of far more importance to you than the mere winning of a bet.”

“If you have finished your scolding,” he told her, “you may do what you yourself suggested, Miss Ingleby, and summon the heftiest footman you can find.”

She left the room without another word.

What if her description was circulating London? she thought suddenly. What if she stepped into the music room on Thursday evening and the assembled guests arose en masse to point accusing fingers at her?

She could not help the foolish feeling that in some way it would be a relief.

OCELYN DID NOT OFTEN ENTERTAIN, BUT WHEN
he did, he did it in lavish style. His chef grumbled belowstairs at having been given no notice at all of the monumental task of preparing a grand dinner to begin the evening and a tasty supper to sustain it at midnight. But he set about the task with a flurry of creative energy instead of resigning on the spot as he threatened to do whenever he stopped work long enough to draw breath.

The housekeeper did not complain, but marshaled her troops with grim determination to banish every speck of dust from the rooms that would be used for the entertainment and to have every surface polished and gleaming. She arranged the lavish mounds of flowers that Michael Quincy had ordered.

As Jocelyn had predicted, almost everyone accepted his invitation even though doing so doubtless involved the breaking of other commitments at the last moment. The chance to attend a dinner and soiree at Dudley House did not come often.

Jocelyn instructed his housekeeper to select or to hire a maid accomplished at dressing a lady's hair. He did toy with the idea of also taking Jane Ingleby to a fashionable modiste and commanding that an evening gown be made up with all haste—he had considerable influence with two or three of London's most exclusive dressmakers—but he did not do so. She would without doubt
make a fuss and end up refusing to sing. Besides, he must not make her look too much the lady, he decided, or his guests would be wondering about the propriety of her having spent almost three weeks beneath his roof as his nurse.

He spent some time during the afternoon in the music room with her, rehearsing two contrasting songs to show off her voice as well as an encore, the possibility of which she protested was nonsense, but which he insisted was not.

He found, as he dressed for the evening, that he was feeling nervous. A fact that thoroughly alarmed him and made him despise himself heartily.

W
HEN SHE HAD BEEN
younger, when her parents had both been alive and healthy, there had been frequent picnics, dinners, and dances at Candleford Abbey. They had loved entertaining. But Jane did not believe they had ever invited anywhere near fifty guests at one time. And even those parties she remembered had been a long time ago. She had been just a girl.

She sat in her room for several hours before getting ready to go downstairs, listening to the distant sounds of voices and laughter, imagining what was happening, what was yet to happen before she was summoned to sing. But it was impossible to predict the exact time of the summons.
Ton
parties, Jane was aware, were quite unlike their counterparts in the country, which almost never continued past eleven o'clock or midnight at the very latest. Here in town no one seemed to consider it strange to be up all night—and then, of course, to sleep all the following day.

She might not be called down before midnight. She would collapse in a heap of the jitters if she had to wait that long.

But finally she could see from the clock on the mantel that Adele, the French maid who had been hired for the evening just to dress her hair, would be knocking on her door in ten minutes' time. It was time to get dressed.

It was far too late to regret agreeing to this madness. There was no one among the guests—she had perused the guest list with great care—who might know her identity. But the Earl of Durbury was in town. What if everyone at tonight's gathering had been furnished with her description? Her stomach lurched. But it was too late.

She determinedly pulled off her maid's frock and drew over her head the carefully ironed sprigged muslin dress she had set out on her bed earlier. It was a dress perfectly suited to afternoon tea in the country. It was not at all appropriate for an evening party even there, of course, but that did not matter. She was not a guest at tonight's entertainment, after all.

She shivered with mingled cold, excitement, and fear.

She had never meant to hide when she fled to London. What she should have done after making the ghastly discovery that Lady Webb was not at home, Jane thought belatedly, was to stay at the hotel where she had taken a room and apply to the earl's man of business in town for funds. She should have boldly proclaimed to all the world that she had been abused and assaulted by a drunken rogue during the earl and countess's absence from Candleford and had quite justifiably defended herself by hitting him with a book and removing herself far from proximity to him.

But she had not done it, and it was too late now.

She was in hiding. And about to show herself to fifty members of the crème de la crème of British society.

What
utter
madness.

A female voice laughed shrilly in the distance.

Someone tapped on Jane's door, making her jump foolishly. Adele had arrived to dress her hair.

A
T ELEVEN O'CLOCK
L
ADY
Heyward, Jocelyn's hostess for the evening, announced the end of the card games that were in progress, while Jocelyn himself directed a few footmen in the moving of the drawing room pianoforte to the center of the room and the arrangement of chairs about the room's perimeter. The musical part of the evening was about to begin.

Several of the younger ladies volunteered or were persuaded to play the pianoforte or to sing. One gentleman—Lord Riding—was brave enough to sing a duet with his betrothed. All the recitals were competent. The guests listened more or less attentively and applauded politely. This was, after all, a familiar form of evening entertainment to them all. Only a few of the acknowledged patrons of the arts ever hired professional artists, but on those occasions the evening was heralded as a private concert.

Finally Jocelyn got to his feet with the aid of his cane.

“Do feel free to stand up and move about for a few minutes,” he said when he had everyone's attention. “I have engaged a special guest for your entertainment before supper. I shall go and bring her down.”

His sister looked at him in surprise. “Whoever can she be, Tresham?” she asked. “Is she waiting in the
kitchen? Where on earth did you find her when you have been almost shut up here for the past three weeks?”

But he merely inclined his head and left the room. Fool that he was, he had scarce been able to think of anything else all evening but this moment. He just hoped she had not changed her mind. Five hundred pounds was a considerable inducement, of course, but he was of the opinion that if Jane Ingleby had decided she did not want to sing, even five thousand pounds would not convince her.