Miss Diamond brushed off Prue’s apology.
“Men like Tiverton don’t need an invitation,” she said. “I warned him last time he attacked one of the maids that I’d ban him from the house.”
“Thank you for your help. And thank you, Lord Jonathan.”
Lord Jonathan was tying his cravat at Miss Diamond’s mirror.
“I enjoyed it,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” Prue said again. “They will make trouble for you.”
He grinned at her before turning back to the mirror. “I hope so. With any luck, they’ll give up on me at this point and approach His Grace.”
“You want them to tell the duke that you… what they accuse you of?” Prue asked.
“Yes, well, I wasn’t expecting them to set me up quite so thoroughly. But it will all be for the best, don’t you think, Lily? His Grace won’t be able to magic this one away with his ducal frown.”
“I don’t understand,” Prue said.
“Nor do you need to,” Miss Diamond said, dryly.
“Why not, Lily? It makes no difference. Mrs. Worth is hardly going to gossip to His Grace.” Lord Jonathan, having tied his cravat to his satisfaction, was shrugging into his waistcoat. “I want to travel, Mrs. Worth. Her Grace, my mother, wishes me to stay in England. His Grace and my brother support my mother. And that’s the sum of it.”
“You deliberately set out to make a scandal so they would send you off overseas.” Prue made that a statement.
Lord Jonathan, adjusting his cuffs, nodded almost absentmindedly.
“But… What they accuse you of is a hanging offence. Even if you get away, you might never be able to return to England.”
Lord Jonathan shrugged. “It wasn’t a perfect plan. But Aldridge will fix it, you’ll see. He’ll get me out of England, and he’ll make sure I can come back, too.”
“You have a lot of faith in your brother,” Miss Diamond said. “I hope it is justified, Gren.”
Lord Jonathan left, and Miss Diamond went out too, taking one of the maids. Prue, after changing out of her damaged gown, immersed herself in the work required to run the house.
Miss Diamond’s insistence on clean sheets every time she entertained presented a problem in the drizzly London winter. Prue’s predecessor had been drying sheets in the kitchen, where they were in the way and hard to keep clean. The small attic chamber Prue had been given could be pressed into service. It was on the leeward side of the house, so the window could be left open. With the fire built up and ventilation to take away the moisture, the sheets should dry quickly enough for her to air the room before she had to sleep in it.
The lock on the book room door was a constant temptation each time she passed the second floor, but with Madame Dupont about, she didn’t dare risk it.
Miss Diamond returned in the early evening, bringing Miss Fraser. She instructed Prue to hold dinner for thirty minutes while she changed, and conducted her guest upstairs to her bedchamber.
She descended in good time. The courtesans’ clothing did not proclaim their profession. Miss Diamond was wearing a rustling gown in a pale cream, embroidered with tiny roses in every shade of pink, from palest blush to a deep cerise. Three strings of pearls wound around her neck, and more twined in her brown hair. Apart from the décolletage, the gown would not have been out of place at Almack’s, and Prue had seen bodices cut even lower in many ballrooms of the beau monde. Miss Fraser’s light blue silk, with its deep flounces of silver lace, would have been demure on a woman less generously endowed, and was certainly not unduly revealing.
“Worth,” Miss Diamond said, calling Prue’s attention, “we are not to be disturbed. Place the dishes on the hall table. Madame Dupont will serve us.”
Now that was interesting.
After supervising the maids who brought the first remove up from the kitchen, Prue hovered on the stairs. The dresser’s feet came out into the hall and back into the back parlour several times, then the back parlour door shut firmly behind her.
With a quick glance to check that none of the servants were in sight, Prue hurried to listen at the door. A distant mumble of voices. She tried again in the front parlour. The hinged doors that separated the two rooms were less sturdy, an occasional word filtering through.
“…like it … wrong…”
“…you … contact, Joy…”
“I don’t think… Why… blackmail… “
This was no good. She just couldn’t hear enough.
What of the linen closet at the far end of the hall? It cut into the corner of the back parlour and was a later insertion. Perhaps the wall might be thinner? She would have to be careful. If she were caught coming out of the closet, she would have some explaining to do!
She moved a pile of tablecloths and one of hand towels so she could insert her head right into the shelf and press her ear against the wall.
“I wish you had not done it, Lil. What if we’re wrong about Hurley?” Surely that was Madame’s voice? But what had become of the French accent?
“If it is one of that horrible crew… you still have Selby under your hand, Jo.” That was Miss Diamond, and Miss Fraser answered her. “I don’t think it can be. We are almost certain those five are the blackmailers. Why, if one of them is feeding us secrets?”
“Perhaps the others don’t know…?” Miss Diamond’s voice.
Miss Fraser snorted. “Unlikely. Not one of them looses wind without boasting of the speed and volume to the other four.”
Madame again: “Then we have lost nothing.”
“Still, I wish you had not banned them from the house,” Miss Fraser said.
“Only Annesley and Tiverton. Not Selby or the others. Besides, what would you have had us do?” Madame asked. “Let another of our servants be raped? Our housekeeper, at that?”
“I suppose not, Ellie,” Miss Fraser said in reluctant agreement. “Well. Done is done. At least Grenford and Talbot are still coming to you, if Hurley isn’t the one. And the duchess.”
Madame and Miss Diamond spoke at the same time.
“Lord Jonathan isn’t worth spending more time on. He’s nothing more than a selfish boy.” That was Madame.
“It isn’t Lady Georgiana.” That was Miss Diamond.
“Is that reason talking, Lil? Or emotion?” Madame again.
“You’re in love with her, are you not?” Miss Fraser asked.
“And what if I am?” Miss Diamond sounded defensive. “It doesn’t affect my work. I’ve been using her to get papers from her father, have I not?”
“If they are real papers, and not a trap,” Madame said.
“Both of the aristos stay on the list.” Miss Fraser was clearly very much in charge.
The muffled sound of the door knocker stopped the conversation.
“I thought you said no one was expected?” Miss Fraser asked.
“No one is,” Miss Diamond said. “No, sit down, Ellie. Worth will get it.”
Prue backed hastily from the closet, smoothing her cap and her apron as she hurried to her duties. Poor Lady Georgiana. It sounded as if Miss Diamond was betraying her, however reluctantly.
Prue opened the door. What was her sister’s husband, Samuel Stocke, doing on the courtesan’s doorstep? She lowered her eyes, hoping he wouldn’t recognise her, but she needn’t have worried. He didn’t deign to look at the hired help as he brushed past, handing her his hat and his walking stick.
“Tell your mistress the Earl of Selby wishes a word with her,” he commanded.
The Earl of Selby? The would-be rapist from the other night? Surely it was Samuel Stocke! She sneaked another look while she took his coat and ushered him into the front parlour, where she left him. Could she be mistaken? She had not seen her sister’s husband in more than three years; he spent little time in the house where he’d settled his wife, and her visits and his never coincided. And the other night he had been in deep shadow.
No. It was him. Or, if not Samuel Stocke, then an exact double. She had never met cousins so alike.
In the back parlour, Madame Dupont was standing by the sideboard, the picture of a confidential servant; Prue pretended not to notice the abandoned plate and the hastily pushed back chair.
Miss Diamond raised both perfectly plucked brows at Prue’s announcement.
“The Earl of Selby? Simon Stocke?” She looked at Miss Fraser, and then at Madame. “Well. This should be interesting.”
“Do you want me…” Miss Fraser began.
“Best if he does not know you’re here, Jo. If we are right about him and his friends, he does not yet connect you with me, except as acquaintances in the same—um—field of work. I will handle it.” Then, noticing Prue, “That will be all, Worth.”
Prue retreated into the hall and then, when Madame followed Miss Diamond out of the back parlour, down the stairs that led to the kitchen.
“Be careful, Lil. He’s vicious.”
“He’s a man, Ellie. I can handle men.”
From her position on the lower landing, their shadows crossed, then separated as Miss Diamond went to her meeting and Madame stayed put.
After a moment’s thought, she descended the rest of the way to the kitchen, and marshalled the maids to carry up the second remove for dinner. Madame wasn’t in the hall when she returned. She ushered the maids into the back parlour, where Madame and Miss Fraser hovered near the folding doors that linked the two rooms.
All too quickly, the maids had cleared the first remove and laid the second. With no excuse to linger, she followed them out of the room, just as the Earl of Selby emerged from the parlour.
He looked very pleased with himself as he handed Miss Diamond his coat and turned, obviously expecting her to valet him. Prue started forward to help, but Miss Diamond gestured her away with a flick of the eyes and a tip of the head.
“Tiv won’t be happy,” the earl gloated.
“You will be, my lord. I guarantee it,” Miss Diamond replied, her voice a husky purr.
The earl caught up his hat and walking stick, and in one fluid movement backed the courtesan against the wall, trapping her with his stick held across her neck.
“I’ll collect on that guarantee,” he said, his own purr sounding of threat rather than promise.
Miss Diamond did not react, standing impassively within the cage he’d formed of his body. He leaned the last few inches and slowly, deliberately, licked the side of her face, from her jaw up to her eyebrow, then grimaced.
In another supple twist, he was off her and heading for the door.
“Don’t wear powder tomorrow night,” he instructed, as he left.
The other two women must have been waiting just inside the dining room, because they ran to Miss Diamond as soon as the front door closed behind the earl. The occasional word reached Prue, standing out of sight in the shadows. Something about ‘definitely the blackmailers’ and ‘paid him off’ and, more clearly, as they broke out of their huddle and passed her hiding place on their way back into the back parlour, ‘This will all be over soon, and we can go home.’
The three women had not yet emerged from the dining room when the next knock on the front door came, nearly an hour later. Prue opened it to Baron Hurley and two other men. The second man, a naval officer by his uniform, was a stranger. The third was standing back off the steps, camouflaged by the dusk, but she didn’t need his face to recognise him. Shadow. Somehow she had sensed his presence as soon as she opened the door.
Odd how his half-brother’s naked torso had affected her. She couldn’t pretend that her enjoyment of Lord Jonathan’s sculpted muscles was purely an aesthetic appreciation, but the yearning he’d aroused was not for him, but for the man out there in the darkness, who had the same broad shoulders tapering to a narrow waist, the same way of seeming relaxed yet fully alert.
“Well, woman, are you going to keep us standing here?” Baron Hurley barked. “Show us in to your mistress.”
Prue, recalled to her duties, told him, “I am not sure if she is receiving, my lord.”
“Well find out, woman. Find out,” the Baron said impatiently.
Another rude man. Prue controlled her spurt of irritation, stepping to one side to let him and the other two in, took their coats and hats, and showed them through to the parlour.
Shadow showed no sign of knowing her. She admired the disciple-like reverence with which he followed the other man. As always, he was utterly convincing in his part. Should she tell him about Selby? About the conversation she overheard between the women?
“Baron Hurley with two other men,” she told Miss Diamond.
“We are popular, are we not?” the courtesan said. “You had better come with me, Jo. Joy, I mean. Otherwise the good baron will be convinced I’m with another man, and he may become tedious.”
The other courtesan shook her head. “No, I have to get back. I expect Selby tonight. Dupont, you go.”
Madame Dupont said, before she left, “You may clear, Mrs. Worth, oui? Moi, I go with the mistress.” The French accent was back, thicker than ever.
Prue set the maids to clearing the table, and the cook to preparing a tea trolley, which Prue took into the drawing room when it was ready.
She waited by the door, a model servant, all the time cataloguing the behaviour of the five she was serving. Miss Diamond, flirting with all three men, while deftly managing to make Hurley and Talbot each believe he was the centre of her attention. Dupont, joining the conversation, running interference for her mistress, attracting the attention of whichever suitor was not Miss Diamond’s focus, so he didn’t feel neglected. Hurley, arrogant and possessive, certain of his welcome, occasionally correcting the ebullient Talbot, who clearly felt no need to bridle his language in front of the courtesan and her servant. And Shadow. The Shadow she knew wasn’t present at all. She, like the others in the room, saw only the thrilled and grateful Davey Walker, overwhelmed to be in the presence of The Divine Diamond of Desire, as he told her repeatedly.
This Davey gave no sign he’d seen the slip of paper Prue put in his saucer, but when she collected his empty cup it was gone.
“Meet tonight. News,” it said.
It would be enough. She might not trust Shadow with her heart, but she could trust him in this. He would be waiting for her in the garden, if only because he was good at his job.
The three men were not the last visitors of the night. Prue had shown them out, the rest of the household had gone to bed, and Madame Dupont was locking up when the door knocker sounded one more time.
The heavily veiled woman on the doorstep didn’t wait for an invitation, but swept past Madame Dupont. “Is your mistress in, Dupont?”
“My lady?” Madame Dupont said uncertainly.
Of course. Prue thought the voice sounded familiar. Lady Georgiana.
“It’s late, my lady. Miss Diamond is preparing for bed,” Madame said.
“I will go up,” the lady declared.
Madame Dupont put out a hand as if to stop her, but Lady Georgiana brushed past as if she were not there, continuing up the stairs. Madame hastily bolted and locked the door before hurrying up the stairs herself. Prue, following behind, saw her standing outside Miss Diamond’s closed door.
She knocked and called out, “Mistress!”
“Go to bed, Dupont,” Miss Diamond called back.
Madame Dupont opened her mouth as if to speak again, but shut it. Seeing Prue, she repeated Miss Diamond’s command.
“Go to bed, Mrs. Worth.”
Sleep was not an option, tired though Prue was. If she lay on the narrow bed in her room, she wouldn’t wake until morning. She did not dare even sit down. She paced the strip of floor between the door and the window, four steps there, four steps back. She could not make her move until the house was quiet.
Fortunately, the rest of the servants had been up as early as she, and were no doubt already asleep. And Lady Georgiana’s visit, unexpected as it was, meant Miss Diamond was unlikely to leave her room again tonight. All Prue had to do was stay awake until Madame Dupont was asleep. And then, out to meet Shadow.