Vice (28 page)

“Yes, of course.” Juliana sprang to her feet. Her hoop swung in a wide arc as she hastened eagerly to the door. A small round table rocked under the impact of the hoop. She paused to steady the table automatically before resuming her swift progress. “She was feeling sleepy when I left her, but it would be lovely to open one’s eyes on a bowl of roses. Aren’t they beautiful?”

Quentin smiled as she buried her nose in their fragrance. “You have only to give order for the servants to cut some for your own apartments.”

Juliana looked up quickly, afraid that he might have read her mind earlier. “Oh, I would pick them myself,” she said. “But someone has already put roses in my bedchamber and boudoir.” She accompanied him down the corridor to Lucy’s chamber, wishing she had the art of small talk to cover her moment of awkwardness.

She opened Lucy’s door quietly and tiptoed in, peeping behind the bed curtains. Lucy opened her eyes and offered a tired smile.

“Lord Quentin has brought you some roses.” Juliana stood aside so that Quentin could approach the sickbed. “I’ll ring for a maid to put them in water.” She reached for the bellpull, then stepped back in case Quentin wished to talk to Lucy alone. He might intend to have a pastoral conversation. But Quentin’s voice was cheerful, and more avuncular than clerical, as he asked Lucy how she did and laid the roses on the bedside table.

“The maid will look after these. I don’t wish to disturb your rest.”

“Thank you, sir.” Lucy’s smile brightened considerably. “I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve such kindness.”

“You don’t have to deserve it,” Juliana stated with a touch of indignation. “When someone’s been so ill treated, they’re entitled to all the compassion and care that decent people can offer. Isn’t that so, Lord Quentin?”

“Indeed,” he agreed, even as he wondered why he
found her passionate declaration such a novel concept. As a man of the cloth, he should have been expounding the principle himself, but somehow it hadn’t crossed his mind until now. The poor were a fact of life. Cruelty and indifference were everywhere in their lives. If he’d thought of their plight at all, he’d simply considered it to be one of the inevitable evils of their world. The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate. Juliana was opening his eyes on a new landscape.

Lucy looked incredulous, and he was glad he hadn’t shown his own surprise at Juliana’s revolutionary doctrine. “I’ll leave you to your rest,” he said. “But should you ever wish to talk to me, please send for me.” He bowed and eased out of the room.

“What would I talk to him about?” Lucy inquired, struggling up on the pillows. “I wouldn’t dare to send for him.”

“He’s a clergyman,” Juliana informed her, sitting on the edge of the bed. “So if you wanted to talk on churchy matters, then, of course, he’d be available.”

“Oh, I see.” Lucy looked less bewildered. “Tell me your story, Juliana. I feel much stronger now.”

Juliana told her as much as the other girls knew, breaking off when a maid entered to put the roses in water. Henny came in a few minutes later with a hot posset for the invalid. Juliana left to dress for dinner.

In her bedchamber she examined herself in the cheval mirror, frowning at her untidy appearance. Her morning’s activities in the Marshalsea had wreaked havoc with her earlier elegance. It was disconcerting to think that she’d had her confrontation with the duke looking like a grubby schoolgirl. That hadn’t prevented him from kissing her, however. She knew she hadn’t mistaken the desire in his eyes, and surely he couldn’t have feigned the passion of that kiss, Perhaps he found scruffy gypsies arousing. Bella at Russell Street had described in her worldly way some of the strange fancies of the men who visited there. Nuns and
schoolgirls … who was to say the duke was any different?

Henny bustled in at that point, and she put the interesting question aside, submitting to the deft, quick hands of the abigail, who plaited her hair and arranged the unruly curls that wouldn’t submit to the pins into artful ringlets framing her face. She didn’t ask Juliana’s opinion about her gown but chose a sacque gown of violet tabby opened over a dark-green petticoat. She arranged a muslin fichu at the neck, adjusted the lace ruffles at her elbows, twitched the skirt straight over the hoops, handed her a fan and her long silk gloves, and shooed her downstairs like a farmer’s wife with her chickens. But Juliana found this treatment wonderfully comforting. She had not the slightest inclination to argue with the woman or play the mistress to her servant.

“Ah, well met, my lady. Shall we go down together?” Lucien emerged from his bedchamber as she passed. His voice was slightly slurred, his eyes unfocused, his gait a trifle unsteady. The reek of cognac hung around him. “Don’t in general dine at m’cousin’s table. Dull work, except that the wine’s good and his chef is a marvel. But thought I’d honor my bride, eh?” He chuckled in a restrained fashion so that it brought forth no more than a wheeze. “Take my arm, m’dear.”

Juliana took the scarlet-taffeta arm. It was utterly unimpeachable for her to go into dinner on her husband’s arm. But how it would plague the Duke of Redmayne! She smiled up at Lucien. “After dinner, my lord, perhaps I could speak with you in private.”

“Only if you promise not to bore me.”

“Oh, I can assure you, sir, I shall not bore you.” Her eyes, almost on a level with his, met and held his suddenly sharp gaze as he looked across at her. Then he smiled, a spiteful smile.

“In that case, my lady, I shall be honored to give you a moment of my time.” He stood aside with a bow to allow her to precede him into the drawing room.

G
eorge Ridge sat staring into his turtle soup with the air of a man who has undergone a deep shock. Around him the noise and revelry in the Shakespeare’s Head tavern rose to a raucous level as the customers washed down the tavern’s famous turtle soup with bumpers of claret. A group of Posture Molls was performing in the middle of the room, but George barely noticed their lewdly provocative positions as they exposed the most intimate parts of their bodies to the patrons. Posture Molls operated on a look-but-don’t-touch principle, arousing the spectators to wild heights but refusing to make good the promises of their performance.

It was a lucrative business and ran less risk of the pox than more conventional whoredom. But George was unmoved. He believed in getting his money’s worth and considered this form of entertainment to be a snare and a delusion. When the girls crawled around to pick up the coins showered upon them by the overexcited audience, he turned his back in a pointed gesture of dismissal. One of the women approached him, her petticoat lifted to her waist. She pushed her pelvis in his face and reached to stroke his hair. He slapped her hand away and cursed her, half rising from his chair in a threatening movement.

“Stinking whoreson,” the woman said, her lip curling. “You look but you don’t pay. A plague on you.” She spat contemptuously into the sawdust at his feet and stalked off, still holding her shift to her waist as she went in search of a more appreciative member of the audience.

George took up his tankard of punch and drained it, reaching forward to the bowl in the middle of the table and ladling the fragrant contents into the pewter tankard. He gulped down half of it and returned to his turtle soup.

Juliana was married to a viscount! He dropped his spoon into the pewter bowl with a clatter as for the first time this fact really penetrated his brain. He hadn’t been able to credit it at first, when the groom in the stables had told him nonchalantly that he was in the employ of the Duke of Redmayne. George had offered a description of the two men he’d seen with Juliana, and the groom had identified them as the duke and his brother, Lord Quentin. A description of the sickly-looking gentleman who’d gone off with the women that morning brought forth a contemptuous curl of the lip and the information that it must have been Viscount Edgecombe, His Grace’s cousin. And then the startling words: “Just married yesterday. Brought ’is wife back ’ere … poor creature!”

Wife!
It wasn’t possible, but the groom had absolutely identified Lady Edgecombe as a lady with unmistakably striking hair and a taller than usual figure. There could be no possible doubt.

George picked up his spoon again. No sense wasting an expensive delicacy. He scraped the bowl with his spoon, then wiped it out with a hunk of bread. Then he sat back and glared at the grimy wall. Behind him there were bursts of laughter and applause. He sneaked a look over his shoulder and then hastily turned his eyes away. Two women were apparently coupling on a table. George found it deeply offensive. Such depravity didn’t go on in Winchester, or even in the stews of Portsmouth, where you could find a sailor and his whore making the beast with two backs on every park bench.

He would have left the Shakespeare’s Head at this point, except that he’d ordered a goose to follow the soup, thinking that a good dinner might quell the roiling turmoil in his belly. If Juliana was truly married to a viscount, then she couldn’t marry George Ridge. Unless it had been a Fleet marriage. The thought gave him some hope, so he was able to face the platter of roast goose swimming in its own grease with more enthusiasm than he might otherwise have shown.

He chewed with solemn gusto, tearing the bird apart with his fingers, spearing potatoes on the point of his knife, heedless of the grease running down his chin, as he drank liberally of the bottle of claret that the landlord had thumped down at his elbow. He was now oblivious of the riotous goings-on behind him. A Fleet marriage seemed more and more likely. How could Juliana in such a few days be truly married to a duke’s cousin? George didn’t know much about the highest echelons of the aristocracy, but he was pretty certain they didn’t marry on a whim. And they didn’t marry women with no name, even if they were gently bred, as Juliana certainly was. So it must be some whoredom arrangement. Presumably she’d been tricked by an illegal ceremony. It made perfect sense, since George had had difficulty imagining Juliana’s seeking her bread by selling her body.

Feeling immeasurably more cheerful, he wiped his chin with his sleeve and called for a bottle of port and a dish of lampreys. Juliana would have to be grateful for the prospect of rescue once she understood the falsity of her present position. He, of course, would have to be very magnanimous. Not many men would wed a harlot. He would be sure to point this out to Juliana. That and the promise to remove all suspicions of her involvement in his father’s death should produce abject submission to his every fancy.

He grinned wolfishly and stuck his fork into the dish of eellike fish, scooping diem into his mouth without pause until the dish was empty; then he launched an attack on a steamed pudding studded with currants.

Two hours later, overcome by sleepiness, but having first ensured that he was sitting firmly upon his money pouch, he allowed his head to fall upon the table and was soon snoring loudly amid the debris of his dinner. No one took the slightest notice of him.

Viscount Edgecombe took a gulp of cognac and gave a crack of amusement as he stared at his wife in her parlor after dinner. “By all means, I’ll show you the town, m’dear.” He hiccuped once and chortled again. “I can show you some sights. Gad, yes.” He drained his glass and laughed again.

Juliana said steadily, “His Grace will not care for it.”

“Oh, no, that’s for sure.” Lucien blearily tried to focus his eyes, producing only a squint. “He’ll forbid it, of course.” He frowned. “Could make himself a nuisance, you know.”

“But you’re not under his control, are you, sir?” She opened her eyes wide. “I can’t imagine your submitting to the orders of anyone.”

“Oh, ordinarily, I wouldn’t,” he agreed, refilling his glass from the decanter. “But I’ll tell you straight: Tarquin holds the purse strings. Very generous, he is, but I’d not care to risk his closing the purse on me. I can’t tell you how expensive it is to live these days.”

“Why does he finance you?” She waited for a coughing fit to subside as he choked on the cognac.

“Why, m’dear, in exchange for agreeing to this sham marriage,” he told her with a final wheeze.

“Then surely you could say that if he doesn’t continue, you’ll repudiate me as your wife,” suggested Juliana, idly smoothing the damask on the sofa where she sat.

Lucien stared at her. “Gad, but you’re a devious creature. Why’s it so important to have at Tarquin?”

Juliana shrugged. Lucien presumably didn’t know the full details of her contract with the duke. “I object to being manipulated in this way.”

A sly look crept into Lucien’s hollowed eyes. “Ah,” he said. “Tarquin said you would do his bidding. Have something on you, does he?”

“Merely that I am friendless and without protection,” she said calmly. “And therefore dependent upon him.”

“So why would you want to put his back up?” The sly look hadn’t left his eyes. “Not in your interests, I would have said.”

“I have a legal contract that he can’t renege upon,” Juliana replied with a cool smile. “It was drawn up by a lawyer and witnessed by Mistress Dennison. He is obliged to provide for me whatever happens.”