The Price of Desire (22 page)

The sound of carriage wheels roused her from her reverie. Visitors were scarce at this time of year when the days were short and the roads muddy. Besides, she had been so busy with running the farm that she had spent little time cultivating the acquaintance of her neighbors. They would cut her dead if they knew her real situation. She had no wish to cultivate such shallow relationships as they could offer her.

At first she didn’t recognize the man who was ushered into her parlor.

Her visitor noticed her confusion and blushed beet red. “Henry Thackeray at your ser vice, ma’am. We met before. In Torquay.”

Henry Thackeray was short and square, and sported massive sideburns that crawled across his face like whiskery black caterpillars. She remembered now. How could she have forgotten the drunken men who had accosted Dominic, and then her, in such a familiar fashion?

Inwardly she groaned, guessing at the reason behind his visit. She ought to accept him, she knew she ought to, but the thought was distasteful in the extreme. Though he was a wealthy banker and could no doubt afford his own personal laundress should he choose, his linen smelled none too clean. She could not abide slovenly habits in a man.

Still, she invited him to sit down, and chose a seat as far away from him as was consistent with politeness. The sour, slightly acrid smell of his unwashed body pervaded the room, mixing unpleasantly with the dampness and the smoke from the coal fire.

“Miss Clemens, or may I call you Caroline?” he continued without waiting for an answer, not giving her a chance to object to his use of her Christian name. “I imagine you are surprised to see me here.”

She bowed her head in acknowledgment. “I was wondering how you found me.” Content for the time being to be left entirely alone, she had not advertised her retreat to Hertfordshire. Indeed, she had been hastened off too quickly to advertise it even had she wanted to.

“I ran into Dominic in town and heard of the reversal of his fortunes.” He shook his head, setting his sideburns waving. “I told him that he should stay right away from that last investment, the one that ruined him, but it seems he took no notice. Foolish boy. You can imagine that my thoughts immediately ran to you, left alone and friendless again.” He smiled at her, showing all his teeth. “Dominic told me where I could find you, hiding out in the countryside. So I hopped onto the train right away and came up here to let you know that there was at least one man left in the world who cared about what happened to you.”

Caroline sat in silence, allowing him to rattle on at her about all the advantages that a liaison with him would entail for her. She supposed she should be glad that she had another customer to buy the meager wares she had to sell, but the only emotion she could manage to summon up was a rather bored distaste. She could not imagine even kissing Mr. Thackeray, let alone welcoming him into her bed. Her body shuddered with revulsion at the mere idea.

“…my wife will not object to our liaison, I can assure you, or make any trouble for you over it. She has everything a woman wants—a couple of fine children in the nursery, a fine house with enough servants to keep it that way, and plenty of pin money for new gloves. I shall keep her sweet with a new dress once in a while. She will be perfectly content with that.” He made an odd face. “I doubt she will even notice that I have ceased to visit her bed.”

She could not do it. Not even for the sake of Teddy’s school fees. She would scrimp and save on the income from the estate and pay for them that way. Mr. Thackeray would never be her lover. It would demean them both. “It was kind of you to come so far to see me.”

He beamed. “It was no trouble, Caroline. No trouble at all.”

“But I could never accept so much from you. Not from a married man.” It was the best excuse she could come up with on the spur of the moment. He had come all that way to see her, and it would be churlish of her to insult him for what he meant as a kindness. “If you were single, it would be a different matter.” She allowed a disappointed sigh to escape her. “But I could never interfere between a man and his wife. It would not be right.”

His face fell. “My wife married me for my money. She does not care for me in the least. I thought that you…that you might understand me.”

Foolish man, to think that he could buy understanding. “No woman marries solely for money. She must have had a good deal of liking for you to accept your suit.”

“Do you really think so?” The hope on his face was almost painful. Whatever had motivated his wife, poor Mr. Thackeray had not married for money. He was clearly still in love with his wife.

A sudden wave of pity swept over her. Poor man, to be wedded to a woman whom he loved but who did not return his affection. Perhaps she could do him a good turn. At any rate it would cost her nothing to try. “I cannot be your mistress, but you deserve some recompense for traveling all this way to offer me your support. Would you like me to teach you how to win your wife’s love back again?”

He blinked at her as if he did not believe his ears. “You could…you would do that for me?”

“If you would like me to.”

“I would like it above all things. But I had thought it impossible. That is why I decided…” His voice tailed off.

“That is why you decided to visit me.”

“Exactly.” He had the grace to look ashamed of himself.

Caroline rang the bell for afternoon tea. “Let me have a few moments to think,” she said, scribbling some notes on the papers in front of her. “We can discuss this over a cup of tea.”

“You wouldn’t happen to have a drop of sherry in the house, would you?” he asked hopefully. “I prefer sherry in the afternoons.”

“I’m sorry, I do not drink spirits,” she said. “Women don’t like spirits overmuch—or their effect on menfolk, either.”

“There seem to be a good many things that women don’t like,” he grumbled as she scribbled. “Strong spirits, muddy boots, and a whole heap of other stuff. What about telling me a few things they do like instead?”

Caroline poured him a cup of the tea that had just arrived—it must have been sitting outside the door waiting for her to request it, it came so promptly. “A woman likes an active man. You must go for a walk every morning. A mile and a half at least.” That would lessen his rather unattractive paunch and help to get rid of his unnatural pallor. Pale skin was all very well, but his looked as though he had just crawled out from under a rock.

His face paled still further at the prospect of so much exercise. “Every morning?” He looked doubtfully into his teacup, sipped a little, and made a face as if it tasted nasty.

“Every morning before breakfast. Then when you arrive home again, you must bathe and trim your whiskers and put on clean linen before you go to your work in the City.” She was tempted to suggest that he shave his monstrous sideburns right off, but she didn’t dare go too far all at once. A good trim would remove the worst of them, so he did not look quite so much like an unkempt werewolf.

This time he just looked puzzled at her suggestion. “Clean linen every morning? I only change it once a week, on Saturdays.”

Ugh. Poor Mrs. Thackeray. The woman must be a saint to put up with her husband’s disgusting habits. “Clean linen every morning,” she repeated firmly. “Then when you return home, bathe and change your linen again when you dress for dinner.”

“Fresh linen again before dinner?”

“There is nothing a woman likes better than the smell of clean linen.”

“What a waste of linen,” he grumbled. “I shall have to buy a ridiculous quantity of smalls. Wouldn’t my wife like a nice pearl brooch instead of all this walking and clean clothes?”

“No doubt she would like a nice pearl brooch as well,” Caroline said, “but that hasn’t worked on its own, has it, or you wouldn’t be here.”

“I’ve bought her half a dozen pearl brooches,” he admitted. “And none of them have made a jot of difference.”

“Does your wife particularly like pearls?”

His face was a picture of confusion at her question. “Doesn’t every woman?”

Poor man. He really did not have a clue about women. She was providing a public ser vice in educating him. “I don’t. Pearls are too bland and colorless—they have no life or fire. I much prefer emeralds. And there is a limit to the number of brooches any woman can wear in a lifetime.”

She let the implication of her words sink in for a few moments and then continued with her lesson. “Then over dinnertime, ask your wife about her day, and listen—really listen—to her answers. Admire her new bonnet. Tell her how elegant she looks. And after dinner, help her to bathe the babies and put them to bed.”

“Help bathe the babies?” He looked frankly horrified at this suggestion. “That’s their nurse’s duty. I wouldn’t know how.”

“Then it’s time you learned…if you want to impress your wife, that is. And when you are in bed with her, you must take care to satisfy her needs as well as your own.”

“But…but she is a respectable woman,” he spluttered. “She doesn’t have needs like that.”

“Nonsense. All women do, respectable or not. It is up to a husband to discover how to first arouse and then to satisfy them.”

His face was splotchy red with embarrassment. “You mean to say that all women…” His voice tailed off into a choke. “Even wives? Even Prudence?”

“Especially wives. They like to know how much they mean to their husbands. I would wager that your Prudence is no different.”

He shook his head in amazement. “I never would have believed it. Do you really mean to tell me that all this…this frippery, matters to a woman?”

“It all matters to a woman. If her heart is not made of stone, this will melt it.”

He clapped his hat back on his head and made to leave, his tea still undrunk. “Thank you for your advice,” he said, rather doubtfully. “I suppose I will try it. I have nothing to lose anyway,” he muttered to himself as he walked distractedly back to his carriage.

Some courtesan she was, she thought wryly as she sat in the window seat and stared idly out at the rain dripping from the hedges. She’d only ever had one customer, and to her shame she had fallen in love with him. That was why she could not entertain any other offers to keep her, though she knew it would be in her best interest to find another protector as soon as may be. Farming was scarcely less uncertain than speculation. The crops could fail or the prices could drop and she would be left once again with nothing. Some fine pieces of jewelry to pawn when the going got rough, or a few elegant gowns that would fetch a decent price at a secondhand clothes shop, would keep her that much further away from disaster.

Just for that reason alone she should not have sent Mr. Thackeray away, for all that she did not like his sweaty palms and his thick waist. He had money and plenty of it. She was a courtesan—she ought to care more about the state of a man’s pocketbook than about the state of his whiskers. But if she were to be honest with herself, all she truly cared about was Dominic.

That week, she entertained visitor after visitor, all of them on the same errand as Mr. Thackeray. Young Frederic Warning was sent happily on his way with a kiss on his cheek—enough to win him the wager he’d entered into with his friends from Oxford. Sir Oliver Pickering made her an offer which, considering the ruinous state of his pocketbook, was relatively generous, but it was not enough to tempt her to accept. Edward Bartles made it clear to her that he only wanted her because she had been Dominic’s, and he was determined to acquire everything that had once belonged to Dominic. She treated him with the scorn that he deserved.

Captain Bellamy even had the effrontery to call to renew his penny-pinching offer. She had her footman throw him bodily out of the door and then had the dogs set loose on him. The sight of him scampering back to his carriage squealing with fright as the dogs snapped at his heels made her heart burn with gladness. When one of the dogs jumped up and ripped a patch off his trousers across his buttocks, her revenge felt truly complete, and she made a mental note to feed that dog an extra ration of fresh meat for supper.

The weeks passed, most days bringing one offer or another to tempt her. None of her callers were remotely suitable. They were all too young, too old, too poor, too mean, or too married. She could not accept any of them to fill Dominic’s place in her bed.

But she was aware that her dithering was not going to fill her coffers. She needed to take another lover, and the sooner the better. Teddy’s fees would not pay themselves, and if she were to see her sisters regularly, she needed to buy their train tickets. They could not afford to visit her on their less than lavish weekly wages.

And she already had plenty of other calls on her money. Her house badly needed reroofing, and a number of her tenants’ cottages were due for repairs. A farm such as hers, she was finding, needed most of the profits ploughed back into it in order to keep it going.

She heaved a sigh. Owning a small country estate, though it gave her somewhere to live, was not the solution to her money worries as she had hoped it would be.

What she needed was a sponsor, a well-connected woman who could advertise her availability—discreetly, of course—and to all the right sort of men. She would be happy to pay a finder’s fee to such a woman, if only she could locate one.

Her hostess at Sugar and Spice. Now there was an idea. Cornwall was too far and out of the way to attract enough bidders, but surely Mrs. Bertram would know of such women in London and be able to provide her with an introduction.

She would ask her at once, while her courage was still hot.

Sitting down at her writing desk, she began to pen a very delicate letter.

Dominic stood before the entrance of the unprepossessing coffeehouse in a shabby part of town—on the fringes of the business district, but not quite part of it.
PALIMPSEST
, proclaimed the sign painted over the door. From a quick glance through the grubby window, it appeared to be simply that, a coffeehouse. He could see a small handful of customers reading their newspapers while enjoying a brief respite from their day’s work. One was eating a large chop, tucking into the fatty cut of meat with great gusto.