The sitting room that night was filled with chatter and the homey, domestic snick of scissors and the rustle of industry. All feminine hands were needed to fashion stars and roses and to embroider the initials TGPOTT into twenty surprisingly fine white handkerchiefs. No consensus had yet been reached about how to make the ceiling of the ballroom midnight blue.
Captain Hardy, who knew how much handkerchiefs cost, had eyed them askance on his way into the smoking room.
So far he hadn’t asked any questions.
The duke was out. Perhaps dining with a family who were blessed with a pretty daughter or two. Mariana could hardly stop it. Why wouldn’t he enjoy their company?
But she’d excused herself from the sitting room earlier than usual that evening, to be alone with the enormity of the things she felt that she had no business feeling.
She settled gingerly in at the little desk in her room and stared at the foolscap, her old friend, and thought:
Dear Mama,
I hope this finds you well.
Help me. Oh, help me please. I need help. I am worried.
I think you would be pleased to know that the duke called me extraordinary. I was so proud. He would know, wouldn’t you think? Because he is.
But how can I be? He has already endured so much. He can be a bit of a bastard, but he is practically a bloody national saint. He is expected to be good, and he is. He is a very fine man. I am grateful to know him.
Oh, but Mama. When I am with him . . .
The way I feel about him is neither small, nor wise, nor bearable.
I so wanted a very different life. A life like the one we had. At the moment, I’ve no business wanting anything at all, unless it’s a paying job.
I suppose some would call me a fallen woman. But I still feel just like myself—just Mariana. No different inside. So I am worried that what I did with Lord Revell was not so much a mistake as simply my nature. And then, what does that say about me? Am I what the newspapers say I am?
Is that why I want to tempt the duke? Is that why he is tempted? Would I be his downfall?
But what are bodies for, if not for this?
The next afternoon, Dot tapped on her bedroom door just as Mariana was drawing heavy lines through a sentence she’d written that she didn’t dare allow anyone to see.
She’d just heard the clock downstairs chime out two o’clock.
“Miss Wylde, a gentleman has arrived who wishes to speak to you. He talks very quickly and has very white teeth. And his name sounds like ‘eeneenee.’”
Mariana shot to her feet. “Oh! Mr. Giannini is here?”
“He’s very handsome, Miss Wylde,” she whispered. She fanned herself. “Cor! Italian! Like Queen Charlotte’s lover!”
“He’s a charming rogue, Dot,” she said firmly. “Don’t lose your heart. Thank you for telling me. If you would bring in tea? Would that be all right? And will you kindly tell him I’ll be down presently.”
Dot darted back down the stairs.
Mariana rubbed a bit of shine from her nose, pulled a few tendrils of hair down to trace her jaw, bit her lips, and rubbed her cheeks. It wasn’t Giancarlo in particular she was attempting to impress. But she knew he would tell the world how he found her.
She gracefully made her way down the stairs. She took the descent at a regal, leisurely pace, as if she were mistress of the manor.
Thusly, Giancarlo was able to admire her as she passed beneath the crystal chandelier.
He looked the same, of course: lean and elegant, all flashing dark eyes, teeth like pianoforte keys, a cravat tied with Gordian knot intricacy, and a perfect swoop of Byronic dark hair.
He covered his heart with his hat as she approached, and bowed.
“Mariana, tesoro mio, luce dei miei occhi—I have found you.”
“Giancarlo! So you have!”
“I ask at every inn in every town. Where is she, the most beautiful girl in England? You must tell me.”
She’d almost forgotten how absurd he was, and how amusing, in his way.
“Only in England?”
He smiled. “In all the world. I would have said it properly, but my charm, she has some rust since I do not see you every day I have no need to use it. NO one else is worthy.”
She snorted. He flirted liked he breathed, and she had no doubt he did indeed suffer if he had no current target.
It wasn’t unpleasant to see him. Or to bask in extravagant compliments.
“And then I ask at this inn and my prayers are answered,” he concluded. Ignoring that Mr. Delacorte had sent him.
“Are you about to answer mine?”
“I am here on business, cara. I bring you gifts.” He reached into his coat and, with a smile that began slowly and grew wide, retrieved something that rustled promisingly.
He held it out to her.
She tried not to be too eager about snatching it. She realized at once the stack was a good deal thinner than she’d anticipated.
“Seven pounds! That’s . . . only a third of what you owe me! Did you think you’d blind me with a smile and I’d forget how to count?”
“Mariana, believe me when I say I wish I could pay you all now, but I have only been paid for part of what I am owed, and it is . . . it steals my sleep. I am truly sorry. I cannot yet pay you all of it.”
She believed him.
Mostly.
“And we will make it all—it will rain down like leaves in autumn, the money—if you were singing. But La Fleurina . . . she is not you. While she once was the queen of all sopranos, she no longer has the range, and certainly not yours, mi amore. And my beautiful opera, it needs it. And she is”—he lowered his voice and whispered, as if confessing a shameful secret—“getting old.”
“Well, so are all of us. So is the audience for opera, for the most part. Surely they can’t see a line or two in her face from where they sit.”
She could feel herself aging as she sat there, no closer to diva-hood than before, or to that one thousand pounds a season Elizabeth Billington once made. No closer to ever being employed again.
He put his fists up to his eyes and mimed looking through them. “With the . . . how you say . . . costosa . . .”
“Expensive glasses.”
“. . . sì, the expensive and beautiful opera glasses.” He mimed a rich audience inspecting the singers on the stage. “They can see if I miss a whisker beneath my chin.” He scraped his hand beneath his chin illustratively. “They will see her lines in her face, and the powder she covers over them with, as she sings of being an innocent virgin, and they will not be kind in the papers. And they will mock. She does not deserve it, but neither do we.”
“It’s a beautiful score, Giancarlo, but I’m hardly an improvement at the moment, am I? They will throw fruit and worse things and hiss at me. They might not go at all if I’m in it. They will not hear a word of your beautiful opera or all the controversy—‘trouble,’ that word means, that is—”
“I think they are all now deciding to, how do you say . . . pretending you never were?”
He said this appalling thing so blithely.
“Shunning me?” she said weakly.
Her heart flipped.
This boded ill for any more ticket sales for the Night of the Nightingale. Or any other work of hers, for that matter. It went a long way toward explaining the quiet, though.
“So I have heard. They do not want to kill you or maim you, just ignore you!” he said brightly. “But soon they will forget it happened, and then I can hire you once more. You are my muse, my angel.”
“Forget it happened? Are you new to London, Giancarlo?” She was a little frantic.
“Someone will shoot someone else soon enough, and they will forget,” he said confidently. “For now, Mr. Tanniger will not allow me to hire you. He agrees that you are best for the role, but he thinks it will be very bad for business.”
Mr. Tanniger, a wealthy businessman, was financing the production.
She was speechless.
“Do not look so sad, Mariana. You have still your glorious talent, and I . . . have another gift!” he said wheedlingly.
From his pocket he retrieved what appeared to be a very plump letter.
“It was sent to you at the theater, and I retrieved it. It’s from Signor Roselli in Paris.”
Signor Roselli was the director of a smaller opera company there—she’d met him. A kind and respected man. Her heart picked up a beat. Paris!
“Thank you, Giancarlo.”
“Prego. Oh, Mariana,” he sighed. “I have missed you. You turn winter into spring. It is always so dull now. No one is like you.”
It was funny. Now that she was learning Italian, she suspected that his compliments were so dramatic because he was making use of the English words he knew in the best way he knew how. He’d likely learned them the way she was learning Italian. Hot cold good bad beautiful sun moon.
“Surely you exaggerate, Giancarlo,” she said, dropping her lashes, partly because she was just a bit parched for flattery and this reliably encouraged more, and partly because Giancarlo was as gifted at creating drama as Helga was at crafting an apple tart. He could be counted on to do it the moment serenity threatened.
He startled her by stepping closer to her. “No, Mariana, cara. It is true,” he said, suddenly, startlingly ardent. “Scandal agrees with you. You glow like the moon and have roses in your cheeks . . . and your . . . lips . . . your eyes are like spring . . . your . . .”
He lowered his eyes to her bosom and dragged them up again a little too slowly. His lips tipped in a crooked, confiding little smile, and he stepped closer still and lowered his voice. “Do you recall, how the night was”—he cast a hand up as though tossing confetti—“so many, many stars, and we kiss?”
She hesitated. “I might,” she said carefully. She was not in the mood to reminisce. They’d had ratafia. He had purred things in Italian she could not understand, but they’d sounded like a lullaby, and then he had seized her impulsively in his arms. He’d unsurprisingly smelled marvelous, and her vanity and sense of competition made sure the kiss that he’d gone in for and that she could not escape had been one he wouldn’t soon forget.
But that was all she would give.
She’d gone heavily limp in his arms immediately after, which made him break his hold on her, and he’d laughed, and so had she, and escaped.
He had not pressed her for more then.
But he did tend to put his hands on her far more than she preferred, especially if he’d had a little wine.
And right now—and probably never again—she did not want to touch or be touched by him.
She felt a sweep of crushing exhaustion. She didn’t want to play this game at all, ever again.
She wished she were in a quiet sun-washed room, watching those russet and amber lights stirring in the eyes of the duke. In a world that seemed unsafe, it suddenly seemed the safest thing, the only place she wanted to be. Although it was hardly safe, either.
“We are alone and the light is so beautiful, as are you, cara, please . . . dammi un bacio.”
Ah, hell’s teeth. Thanks to her Italian lessons, she knew what that meant, so at least she was somewhat prepared for what was about to happen.
“Oh, I don’t think so, Giancarlo. Not now. Not here.” Not ever, but since he could employ her, since he wrote music she would die to sing, she could not produce the sterner commands she’d learned.
“Oh, come now . . . we are alone. Just think how it could be . . . Voglio baciare il tuo seno . . . Voglio le tue mani su tutto il corpo . . . Dammi un bacio.”
“Giancarlo!” she said firmly. “Ti chiedo di parlarmi con rispetto. I must ask that you not speak to me that way. Not even in jest.”
She didn’t think he was jesting, but she thought she’d give him an opportunity to back away gracefully.
“We need not speak at all if we are kissing,” he explained, logically. Teasing.
“Giancarlo. I don’t want to kiss you. Please stop.” Her voice escalated in pitch.
He didn’t seem to notice that she wasn’t laughing. He laughed and snaked an arm around her. She pushed it away. She pivoted, but he was too fast, and he got the other one around her, too. She pushed at that.
And he half waltzed, half backed her toward the mantel, where she would not be able to turn around. All the while grinning as if this were merely a game of charades.
He transferred one of his hands to her hip. She twisted again, but he’d managed to plant the other hand on her hip.
And then another voice seemed to come everywhere and nowhere at once, like God, or perhaps Satan. It was low, calm, and so menacing all the fine hairs at her nape prickled erect:
“Se non le togli subito la mano dal culo, la rimuoverò con una spada.”
Giancarlo’s hand flew from her body as if it had been lopped off, and he staggered backward and whirled around.
Mariana adroitly stepped away from his reach and spun.
To find the Duke of Valkirk standing in the doorway. Pure, cold fury in his eyes.
A long silence ensued, during which invisible flames of wrath seemed to lick at Giancarlo’s ankles. Giancarlo was motionless. Unless one counted the sudden rapid rise and fall of his chest.
“Would you like me to remove him, Miss Wylde?” the duke said politely. His voice was all taut, and nearly dripped icicles. He didn’t move his gaze from Giancarlo.
“From . . . this earthly plane?” Mariana nearly stammered.
It was just . . . he looked capable.
His lips performed the slightest of taut curves. “From the premises.” He turned to Giancarlo, and added, shortly, “For a start.”
Giancarlo had gone as white as the marble-fronted fireplace. Other than this, and a certain tautness of his own features, his composure remained admirable. He raised his palms in self-deprecating surrender. “There is no need to speak of me as if I am not here. Or to . . . cut off my hand with a sword.” He lowered his hand and circled his wrist with the other hand. “I shall take my leave. Miss Wylde, I apologize if I offend”—he looked the duke full in the face, his own speculative, awed, and resentful—“or trespass. If you will please allow me to pass, I will go.”
He bowed quite beautifully—first to Mariana and then to the duke—because he was a graceful man, and second only to his instinct to flirt was his instinct for self-preservation.
Mariana held her breath while the duke’s eyes followed his swift progress from the building. No doubt he was counting Giancarlo’s pores, memorizing his eyelashes as he passed.
Mariana was surprised not to see two smoking holes in the back of Giancarlo’s head.
The slam of the heavy door echoed in the foyer.
Mariana put a hand to her heart as if to steady it. Her face was still hot.
He remained in the darker foyer. She remained in the light of the reception room. In silence, she and the Duke of Valkirk regarded each other.
No man had ever before come to her defense.
“Grazie,” she said. A little ironically. Almost shyly.
“Prego,” he said shortly.
James found he could not quite produce a smile for her yet.
His fingers were still curled; they buzzed as though they’d been deprived of the feel of that man’s throat. Emotion entirely out of proportion to the situation simmered in his veins.
“Anger” was the safest word to call it.
She was so pale that the little gold spots on her face stood in stark relief, but two hot, pink, embarrassed spots sat on her cheeks.
“But he’s a brilliant composer,” she said finally, ironically, as though they’d been exchanged in a long, silent litany of Giancarlo’s grave flaws.
He managed a short, humorless laugh.
She cleared her throat.
“I’m terribly sorry you were forced to witness that, let alone intervene.” Her hands went to her cheeks. “I’m just so embar—”
“No. Please don’t apologize. There is no need. I am only glad that I was here and could be of some assistance.”
There were questions he wanted to ask. Of her, but mostly of himself, when he was alone. Because he could not catch hold of the ragged ends of his outsized rage to trace it back to its source.
She cleared her throat. “Signor Giannini is a composer, and our relationship is professional. He brought about a third of the money he owes me. He’s dissatisfied with the current casting choices for his opera, and since he cannot hire me at the moment, for obvious reasons”—she grimaced wryly here and she flashed a quick little smile—“and he claims he missed me. One can hardly blame him for that, yes?” Her voice faltered. “Though he tends to express such sentiments . . . with his hands.”
Her words began in a brittle, cheerful rush. They ended nearly inaudibly.
Mariana, he wanted to say softly.
She looked so alone, standing in the middle of the room. He realized he’d never fully understood her actual aloneness so acutely until now. The absolute singularity of her position.
“I hope,” the duke said carefully, “I have not introduced a complication into your milieu by interrupting your . . . shall we call it a conversation?”
She quirked the corner of her mouth. “Oh, what’s one more complication? It seems I’ve an infinite capacity for them. Rather like Mr. Delacorte has for gravy.”
James smiled a little, only because she seemed to need it.
“Will you be all right now, Miss Wylde?” he said finally, a little stiffly.
“Oh, of course,” she said quickly. A flush rose swiftly again. “I’ll just sit here a moment and drink my tea. Please do carry on with your day, Your Grace. Thank you.”
“It was no trouble at all.”
He turned at once to leave. And as he moved across the foyer, he did not slow his pace. But he could not keep his head from turning, just slightly, to look back.
She was still. The light that always seemed to animate her, so that she perpetually glowed like a little lantern, seemed dimmed. She looked weary, stunned, and ashamed.
He was shocked by how this cleaved him.
He turned away abruptly, as if to protect her from his gaze.
Once back in the anteroom, James lowered himself slowly and stiffly into the chair, as if he were gingerly carrying something volatile.
He did not recognize his mood.
He did not recognize himself.
He took up his quill and aimed his gaze out the window, but he didn’t see the river, the milky-blue sky, the man urinating against the building, the black cat making a slinky left turn into the alley.
A knot like a spiked, mailed fist sat between his ribs. His mood eluded naming, and its persistence remained all out of proportion to the circumstances, which had been common enough: he’d come upon a man behaving like a cad, and he’d put a stop to it. Young men, especially charming, good-looking young men, had seized upon such opportunities since the world began, and it was the job of honorable men to stop it when they could.
That was it. Something about that word.
Common.
He closed his eyes as he again saw Giancarlo’s hands at Mariana’s waist, her elbow, her hip again as she twisted and dodged and backed away. If a duke had not issued a threat to his life in the doorway, the man would no doubt have kept at it until she’d had no choice but to knee him in the baubles. Or capitulate. It had been a diversion to that man. It was clear he’d done it lightly.
The wrongness of this. It had felt like watching someone use the grail for a spittoon. Or an emerald for a shuttlecock. “Sacrilege” seemed like hyperbole, considering, but James couldn’t think of a better one.
All he knew was that she was not common.
The more accurate—and troubling—word was “rare.”
He knew, in a way that made his breathing go peculiarly shallow, that she was rare.
The flustered, shamed spots of pink in her cheeks, her chin resolutely hiked as she visibly gathered the tinselly shreds of her usual composure about her—he understood viscerally now something he suspected she did not yet fully realize, and he saw it because he was a man. There would be no ultimate winning against the Giancarlos of the world. Flirtation and charm and firmly issued Italian or English requests to behave might forestall them. But she could not ever fully stop them.
And it would surely wear her out in the end.
Unless and until she acquired the armor of a diva.
That mailed fist between his ribs clenched more tightly.
He drew in a long, long breath to prove he could, and released it. He had frightened her, which he regretted, and awed her, which he did not. Her gratitude felt like a warmth against his skin, felt like a medal pinned to his chest.
And then, as he’d stood there unable to speak, a slow-dawning radiance supplanted uncertainty as her eyes searched his. She’d found something there.
He wondered what she’d seen.
She drank her lukewarm tea, and sat in the reception room. She wanted to be alone for a while in a room where, for the first time in her life, a man had come to her defense.
And looked at her the way the Duke of Valkirk had just looked at her before he’d left the room.
She was chagrined she hadn’t finished her assignment, but she fetched the foolscap from her room anyway, before she took herself off to her Italian lesson. There was no sense in wasting it.
She paused for a moment in the doorway, as usual.
“Good day, again, Miss Wylde.”
“Good day again, Your Grace, Duke of Valkirk.”
He flicked a wry glance up at her. A sheet of foolscap lay before him, and a glance—she saw a salutation, what appeared to be a column of numbers—made her think he was writing a letter to his Man of Affairs.
The pages of his manuscript were stacked and pushed to the far side of the table, as if he couldn’t bear to look at them.
She settled herself into her chair.
“How is your work on your life’s story proceeding?” she asked. Rather wickedly.
“Apace,” he said shortly. He flicked his eyes up to her again, went still, and a faint furrow appeared between his brows. He was distracted.
“‘Apace.’ What a usefully vague word that is. I suspect it means ‘not at all.’”
This ought to have won her a reasonably good-humored scowl at least. But he seemed lost in thought. Between his fingers the quill pen was poised, the feather trembling, as though impatient to return to the work of writing.
Then he leaned back and regarded her, his brows knit.
“I think I ought to learn the word for ‘sword,’ Your Grace. Because I suspect that was the difference in your success and mine, when it came to Giancarlo.”
He snorted. “Spada.”
“I wondered if—”
“Miss Wylde,” he said so abruptly she froze.
He didn’t speak immediately. He seemed to be choosing his words carefully.
“I should like you to know,” he began, as though he was picking his way through unknown terrain, “that I am not in the habit of threatening anyone with sword violence as a first line of defense, especially an unarmed man. I will assess a situation and, if it seems necessary, step in and at once break a man in half like a bundle of twigs. I will do that without announcing my intention or issuing threats. I don’t believe in wasting words or actions.”
She went breathless.
“A bundle of twigs?” she repeated softly.
“Yes. That is to say . . .” He took a breath. “I regret the means by which I accomplished my ends today. I do not regret the ends.”
She sat quietly a moment.
“Perhaps it is just you were out of practice in threatening composers. One often overshoots the mark when attempting something new.”
“Nevertheless.”
She wanted a smile from him, but given his mood, it seemed clear she wasn’t going to get a complete one, just one of those little taut affairs.
“Perhaps you were simply overcome with emotion at witnessing a friend in distress, Your Grace.”
There was a little silence.
“Ah, yes. ‘Overcome with emotion.’ That sounds like me.”
She smiled at him slowly. He was regarding her with a little furrow between his brows. He didn’t take up the word “friend.”
She was as absurdly glad as if she’d gotten away with an epithet in the drawing room.
Finally he returned his attention to his foolscap and said nothing more, which she took to be her cue to write her sentences.
After tapping her quill to her chin, she thought of a sentence, and began to scratch it out.
Then she paused.
“It might reassure you to know, Your Grace, that Giancarlo has only a basic command of English, and it was likely a charity to him that you were direct in a way that could not be misconstrued. I suppose it’s an impulse of his age. It seems a reflex with men to have a go if they think they can get away with it. That is, why haven’t you tried to kiss me?”
Those last words emerged like a bullet she hadn’t known was in the chamber.
She’d shocked herself breathless. She felt as though they’d entered the room like a cymbal crash.
The duke didn’t seem to hear them.
His head remained fixed on his foolscap; his quill continued scratching in leaps and darts, making those consonants like the masts on ships and the swoops below like their decks. “Because if I were to kiss you, Miss Wylde . . .” He jabbed a period at the end of a sentence and looked up at her. “It would ruin you for all other men.”
There ensued an instant of absolute silence and stillness.
Such that when the gold sliver of the second hand on the clock shifted, it echoed like a gunshot.
She sat, airless, as the words all but detonated in her, sending a shocking onslaught of heat through her, tensing her muscles, waking something raw and new and so needful that her eyes burned, and she could not say whether it was longing or fury.
She knew, with a certain despair, that he only spoke truth.
He did not lift a brow. He didn’t duck his head to fix her with a smolder. Such embellishments were wholly unnecessary. After all, everyone understood what went on inside volcanos. It was why one did not recklessly tiptoe about their rims.
Now was the time for a light, insouciant laugh, or a joke.
She parted her lips to do it.
There emerged a sound like the wheeze of a gently squeezed concertina.
He gestured to her foolscap. “Shall I have a look?” he said mildly.
He seemed to have complete command of his voice. His expression hadn’t changed.
But she had no doubt that he’d read her as clearly as he read Italian or the map of a battlefield.
Mutely, her palms damp, she pushed it over to him.
She didn’t take her eyes from him when he lowered his head. She studied the severe lines of him: the narrow part in his hair, the vast horizontal shelf of his shoulders. The gold-brown hands with the copper hair at his wrists. She realized only then that while she was learning Italian, she’d also been learning him with an unseemly hunger.
She’d written only one sentence.
But his head stayed lowered a second or two longer than this warranted.
She wondered—it occurred to her—that perhaps his own composure wasn’t entirely shatterproof. That perhaps he had shocked himself.
And at this notion, her heartbeat became nearly painful in its slamming.
He read aloud finally.
“‘I use my sword to cut the roast of beef.’”
He slowly raised his head. His eyes had gathered that light she had come to so appreciate, to count on, when he looked at her. His expression was difficult to interpret. He, too, was schooling his features. She was certain of it.
However, she suspected part of this was because he was tempted to laugh.
“I thought they ought to be put to some use during peacetime,” she said, subdued. “Swords.”
He nodded once, gravely. “Swords might indeed languish in peacetime if there were no women to defend from composers.”
Damn.
He was funny.
And if she was being truthful with herself, she’d thought he was funny from the very first.
His wit was as subtly dangerous as the rest of him. It sneaked up on you like a sunrise and took you over until you were lit all through with a sort of quiet and total delight.
She couldn’t speak. They regarded each other across the table. Her eyes still burned strangely with some suppressed emotion. As did her heart. Like joy or fury, only too bound in thorns and brambles to get a good look at it.
And that’s precisely how it would stay: bound. It could strain all it wanted at those bonds.
She had more sense than that.
He pushed the foolscap back to her.
“Write it using all of the pronouns and verb tenses,” he suggested. Then he dipped his quill, and he resumed writing, and in seconds it was as though she was forgotten.