The Deception of the Emerald Ring (21 page)

Letty did. More precisely, she remembered the way he had managed to cut through several layers of cloth with one neat flick of his eyelids—and then yawned, as if the exercise hadn't been worth the effort. She didn't like him one bit better for the recollection. At present, his eyes were focused firmly above the neck, gazing at her as guilelessly as the most persnickety dowager could demand. All he needed was a white smock over his uniform and a candle in his hands to provide a credible imitation of a choirboy at evensong.

He took a very tiny step forward, saying, with studied humility, "Forgive me for prying, but I couldn't help but notice that you and my cousin seem to be at odds."

"Oh, we just travel under separate names for our own amusement," replied Letty pithily. "It's a little game we play."

"So beautiful," murmured Jasper, reaching out to place two fingers beneath Letty's chin, "and so brave."

"You're too kind." Letty slid neatly out of the way, leaving him crooking two fingers into empty air.

Jasper rallied rapidly. "I was desolated to hear that you had left town."

"Your spirits must be easily depressed."

Jasper threw his head back and laughed, revealing very large, even teeth.

"How could my cousin not appreciate such a wit?" Letty could have told him that snippiness and wittiness weren't quite the same thing, but Jasper had learned his lesson. Without pausing for her response, he said expansively, "On the contrary, my lady—"

"Mrs.," corrected Letty.

Eyes narrowing slightly in irritation, Jasper soldiered gamely on. "On the contrary, Mrs . er. On the contrary, I was simply disappointed by your departure. I had hoped to get to know you better."

Letty only just refrained from rolling her eyes. That was all she needed, another rake. Another Pinchingdale rake, at that. The family appeared to breed them in excessive supply. Drat! Letty threw a quick glance in the direction of the front door, which was now firmly closed, the sound of her husband's boots no longer audible through the thick panels. While she had been detained by the suspiciously complimentary Jasper, the primary rake, the one to whom she was actually bound in matrimony, had managed to make good his escape.

There hadn't been awfully much time for Lord Pinchingdale to have arranged with his cousin to detain her, but it wouldn't take very much arranging, would it? Just a quick "Stop that woman!" tossed over his shoulder as he fled down the stairs, one rake to the other.

Letty pushed away from the wall. "Your duty to your family does you credit, Mr. Pinchingdale," she said acidly. "Now if you will excuse me "

"I can excuse anything"—Jasper moved to intercept her—"except your absence."

It was a line straight out of The Rake's Guide to Seducing Gullible Women. It was an insult to her intelligence and to all of womankind.

"Why, Mrs. Alsdale!" trilled Gilly Fairley, emerging from the drawing room on a wave of perfume that rivaled Cousin Jasper's cologne. "Are you leaving already?"

Maybe not all of womankind.

"I was attempting to," replied Letty tightly, trying to think of one reason why she shouldn't dislike the woman, and failing miserably. One was supposed to be kind to poor dumb creatures, but that didn't mean one had to like them, especially not when they possessed graceful necks and willowy arms—or did she mean willowy necks and graceful arms? Either way, Miss Fairley had them and she didn't.

"But you can't go!" wailed Miss Fairley, lovely even in distress.

"Exactly what I was telling her," seconded Cousin Jasper, with a forceful nod.

With one impatient flick of her dainty wrist, Miss Fairley dismissed Cousin Jasper as if she were shooing away a fly. She looked appealingly at Letty. "Mrs. Lanergan said the most lovely things about you. I was so hoping to make your acquaintance!"

"Some other time, perhaps."

"What a brilliant idea! Oh, Mrs. Lanergan wasn't exaggerating in the least when she said you were a clever-clocks."

Letty was still reeling under being called a clever-clocks—clever-clocks?—as Miss Fairley carried impetuously on. "You will come to me for tea tomorrow, won't you? Oh, say you will, dear Mrs. Alsdale! We're at number ten Henrietta Street, the dearest little house. I just know we'll have the loveliest chat, and you can tell me all sorts of clever things."

Letty attempted to answer in a language Miss Fairley would understand. "Not to be a silly-socks, but—"

"Splendid!" Miss Fairley clapped her elegant hands in delight. "Two o'clock, then?"

"Unfortunately"—Cousin Jasper wiggled his way between Miss Fairley and Letty, no small feat for such a large man—"Mrs. Alsdale is already promised to me for tomorrow afternoon."

"I promised no such thing," protested Letty.

"In that case"—Miss Fairley beamed disingenuously at Letty—"there can be no obstacle to our having a lovely little coze."

Other than one inconvenient husband, that was. Letty looked from Cousin Jasper, who was stroking the plume on his hat with the complacent air of one who knew himself irresistible to women, to Miss Fairley, guilelessly beaming at Letty from her frothy nest of curls. It wasn't much of a choice. Even if Jasper's smugness weren't repellent in itself, her conscience pricked her on. Someone was going to have to warn Miss Fairley about Lord Pinchingdale. The girl clearly didn't have the sense that God gave a goose, and even if Letty didn't particularly care for her, she couldn't just stand by and let her be ruined. It vaguely occurred to Letty that this sort of reasoning had gotten her into trouble in the past.

But what more could possibly happen? She was already married to the man. It couldn't get any worse than that.

"No," Letty said glumly. "No obstacle, at all."

It was sheer coincidence that Jay chose a restaurant in South Kensington.

As a dweller in the less posh segments of the city, I seldom had cause to come out to South Ken. The last time I had trudged up those tube steps, past the Kodak store and a vendor improbably hawking Persian carpets, I had been on my way to Onslow Square to visit Mrs. Selwick-Alderly, descendant of the Purple Gentian, and aunt to Colin.

At the time, the former had seemed far more important than the latter.

As I scurried across the street to the Brompton Road, I peered over my shoulder to the left, half expecting to see a phantom figure in a green Barbour jacket strolling into the aureole of the streetlamps, like Sherlock Holmes emerging from a Victorian fog. On the tube on the way over, I had run through half a dozen versions of the imaginary encounter. I would express surprise at seeing him, of course. He would remind me that we were just around the block from his aunt's flat (which I would pretend to have forgotten). He would ask what I was doing in South Ken, and I would let drop, ever so casually, that I just happened to be on my way to a date. Yes, a date. With a man. Leaving out little details like the fact that it was a grandparental setup and the guy lived in another city. Around that point, a cab would zoom too close to the curb. Stumbling back, out of the way, I would bump into Colin. He would put an arm out to steady me, but once there, he would find he couldn't look away .

You get the idea.

And then I would hop back up, thank him for catching me, and exclaim that I really had to run, or I'd be late for my date.

There was another version, spun out in quite satisfying detail in the British Library cafeteria that afternoon, where I didn't pull back right away. "I meant to call you," he would say, as I swooned glamorously over his arm, defying gravity in the best of all possible ways. "But I was [hit by a cab; gored by a wild bull; in hospital with cholera]. Come to dinner with me, and I'll make it up to you."

Three bottles of imaginary wine, two drip-free candles, and one classical CD later

I'd gone through the story so many times in my head, down to the worried lines on either side of Colin's eyes when I said "date," that it came as a shock when no tall, blond figure strolled up to me out of the mist. I caught myself craning my head backward, searching the rapidly moving pedestrians for a telltale glint of light on a blond head. Where was he? Didn't he know he was supposed to be here?

Clearly not. All I got was the screech of tires and a phrase of indecipherable abuse in a thick cockney accent as a cab narrowly missed clipping me in the knees.

It didn't seem quite fair for the cab to show up, but not Colin.

That, I reflected, shoving my gloveless hands into my pockets and concentrating my gaze grimly ahead, was the danger of daydreams. Go down that route frequently enough, and they attained their own sort of reality. Maybe it all came of being in a profession where one lived within one's own head most of the time, consorting with the shadowy reconstructions of long-buried individuals.

Hunching my shoulders against the wind, I concentrated on not bumping into anyone. In the premature dark of November, with an overlay of rainy-day mist, the people hurrying past on either side of me might have been something out of a Magritte exhibition, nothing but walking raincoats and the occasional hat. They all seemed to know exactly where they were going.

I tried to remember where I was supposed to be going. I had spent so much time planning the imagined encounter with Colin that I hadn't devoted very much to the actual date. I knew it was an Indian restaurant, and I had a vague notion that it should be on the right-hand side. Jay had caught me on the mobile just before I'd gone into the Manuscript Room that morning. I hunched in the far corner of the third-floor balcony, speaking in a low mutter and trying to look as though I weren't on the phone. In about three minutes, he had efficiently conveyed all the salient information. Indian restaurant. Brompton Road. Seven thirty. I verified that I would be there, and he rang off.

It was a bit like making a doctor's appointment.

Unfortunately, I hadn't had the good sense to actually look up the restaurant on the computer before charging out to South Ken. After all, it was on Brompton Road, and even I knew where that was. How hard could it be to find? I had forgotten that Brompton Road goes on quite a ways. And I can get lost in my own room. I shoved my hands deeper into my pockets in a futile attempt to bring the two sides of my raincoat together, wishing the short, belted coat covered more of my knees. The clammy wind bit through my tights in the crucial gap between boots and skirt, making inroads up my thighs.

I knew I should have worn pants.

But the Colin daydream had demanded a skirt. So, like the deluded creature I was, I told myself it was all about being a good granddaughter and looking nice so that when Jay reported to Muffin or Mitten—or whatever her name was—Grandma wouldn't have to blush for her progeny's progeny. I hared off home early from the British Library, trading my sensible brown wool pants for a herringbone skirt and a clingy cashmere sweater. My last pair of tights had a run in them just above the knee, but I figured if I turned them the wrong way around, so the run was in the back, Colin—er, I meant Jay—would never notice.

Taking stock of the final effect, I'd been pleased—it looked like the sort of outfit I could have worn to the library, or at least the sort of outfit a nonacademic might imagine someone wearing to the library. Brown suede boots, only slightly mangy-looking from the incessant rain; herringbone skirt with leather piping that matched the boots and made my legs look longer than they actually were; and soft, cream-colored cashmere sweater that clung in all the right places, and darkened my hair from red to russet. The overall effect was quite pleasing. It was also cold.

Fortunately, just as I began to fantasize about woolly pajamas, the smell of curries arrested my attention. I made a sharp left, cutting off two people heading in the opposite direction, and stumbled gratefully through the doorway, almost colliding with a coat-tree. It was definitely a South Kensington restaurant. The Indian restaurants near me in Bayswater looked more like Chinese restaurants back home, with small, linoleum-topped tables crowded close together in low-ceilinged rooms. Here, both the decor and the clientele had a determinedly trendy look about them. The tables were all in bright primary colors, set with equally bold plates, shaped like a child's attempt to draw a square, all the lines just slightly off-kilter. Ahead of me, a long, glass bar, backlit with blue bulbs and red fittings, dominated the front of the room, dotted by tall stools topped in red, green, blue, yellow, and purple, like an uneven row of very ugly flowers.

I spotted Jay right away, standing by the bar, but not at it, just to the right of a bright red stool.

I would have known him even if he hadn't been scanning the room in that blind-date sort of way, more apprehension than hope. There was something indefinably American about him. My father always says you can tell by the shoes, but I thought it had more to do with the way his brown hair was a little too neatly brushed, and his features a little too clean-cut, as if everything had been pressed out of a plaster mold, from the top of his neatly parted hair to the leather tassels on his loafers. Like a Ken doll.

I wondered if he bent at the waist. My Ken didn't, which was a source of great annoyance to his harem of Barbie dolls, who could never get him to sit down for dinner in the Barbie dream house. Maybe that's why he was standing instead of sitting at the bar.

Pushing such irrelevancies out of my mind, I gave a little smile and wave—just enough to indicate greeting, but not enthusiastic enough to be misconstrued as "take me now!"—and made my way toward the bar.

"Eloise?"

His voice in person was better than on the phone, less gravelly. Which made sense, given that it was coming from right there, rather than through strange, wireless contraptions.

"Hi!" I said, sticking out a hand. "And you're Jay?"

Rather than shake my hand, he did a clasp and pull. Taken off balance, I stumbled slightly as his lips brushed my cheek, landing heavily against the bar, and trying to look as though I'd meant it all along.

"Are you hungry?" he asked, signaling to a waiter.

I wondered what he would say if I said no.