The next morning, sitting at the work table in the kitchen just as Helga was beginning the day by beating eggs and shouting orders to the scullery maids, Delilah succinctly and in a low voice told Angelique about Mr. Brinker, touching upon just the salient points—well dressed, wealthy, supercilious toad, squeezed her breast, was hell-bent on rape until Captain Hardy pulled a pistol on him and put a dent in the little table with his head.
She didn’t embellish with emotion. She didn’t really need to.
Angelique was pale and silent.
“But at least we still have his three sovereigns,” Delilah concluded.
They both smiled blackly.
Similar senses of humor certainly helped get them through their days.
“Are you all right, Delilah?” Angelique touched her knee. “It’s a terribly shocking thing, and I’m just . . . I’m so very sorry that happened to you.”
“I’m surprisingly very good. Not a nick on me.”
Angelique tipped her head and studied her. Then narrowed her eyes. “You do look unusually radiant.”
“Mmm,” Delilah said.
She felt radiant, and a little sore in a marvelous way, but she wasn’t about to say that. It was as though life had acquired an entirely new dimension. One where all the colors and feelings were kept.
Angelique continued her perusal of her, seemed to be considering saying something, thought better of it. “Did you tell Dot?”
“We can’t tell Dot. It will destroy her.”
“She likes opening the door, however. She finds it fun to discover who’s out there. I think you need to tell her a very little, enough to genuinely scare her into not opening the door after a certain hour, but not enough to inspire her to don a hair shirt over it.”
“Very well.” Delilah sighed. “We need to hire footmen, perhaps. Or carry little knives in our bodices.”
“I believe you are right. I think we need at least one footman,” Angelique said, fretfully. “Blast it. Men eat so much and they’ll want to be paid.”
They both smiled at this.
Though with the new sovereigns Mr. Brinker had left behind, hiring a footman was now a possibility. Quite the irony.
Would any footman want to work in a household brimful of females?
Helga was now singing a little song in German.
“Delilah . . . what on earth was Captain Hardy doing in the drawing room at midnight?” Angelique said suddenly.
Delilah went still. She hadn’t considered this. It was, in fact, a good question.
“Perhaps he couldn’t sleep and heard voices? Went in search of a late-night libation?”
“He heard voices over the sound of Delacorte snoring?”
It was, in fact, a very good question.
“Do you know what Brinker said when he was flat on his back, blood oozing from his nose? ‘Oh, you’re that Captain Hardy.’ What do you suppose he meant?”
Angelique looked thoughtful.
Then shook her head. “I couldn’t begin to guess. Maybe Brinker was simply dazed from the blow to the head.”
“That must be it,” Delilah said blithely. “Helga, do you think we can have extra sausage for breakfast? I am starving.”
A night of unforgettable lovemaking put Tristan in a downright sprightly mood. He was bounding out through the foyer to have a look at his ship and to meet Massey for breakfast when a dulcet female voice called from the drawing room.
“Good morning, Captain Hardy.”
He stopped.
Mrs. Breedlove was alone, sitting on the settee, fetching in a gray morning gown with the light behind her.
“Good day, Mrs. Breedlove. Tolerable weather we’re having.”
She was as different from Lady Derring as diamonds from daisies. They were both beautiful women in their ways, shaped, he suspected, by entirely different circumstances.
“I’ve a little tea left in the pot, Captain Hardy, if you’d like it before you leave. I thought I’d drink it quietly before we feed the family, as it were.”
All at once he was certain Mrs. Breedlove had something she wished to speak to him about. It was also an opportunity to ask a few pressing questions of his own.
“That’s a kind offer. Thank you.”
He sat in the chair opposite her. “You and Lady Derring have created such a comfortable, welcoming place here. How did the two of you come to meet?”
“I was her husband’s mistress.”
Whatever he’d been expecting—circumspection? A delicate use of euphemism?—it wasn’t that. He had the sense that she’d intended to shock him. Or to discover whether he was, in fact, shocked.
“You don’t say,” he said neutrally.
Which made her smile. “We discovered, awkwardly and quite accidentally, that Derring had left the two of us penniless. We found we had a good deal in common in addition to the feckless Earl of Derring. The only thing Delilah had left was this building, and she was kind enough to include me in her mad scheme. We rub along together quite well.”
“Lady Derring is kind. As are you,” he added, gallantly. Though he was less certain such a gentle word applied to Angelique.
She didn’t thank him. Angelique merely tipped her head. “You and I are very alike, I think, Captain Hardy.”
“Ah. Does your beard begin to darken at about five o’clock, too?”
She smiled politely. “Nothing makes a dent. Not anymore. But that’s all to the good, isn’t it?”
Tristan stared at her, instantly cautious.
“I find it so,” he said shortly.
“I’ve concluded people are more or less the same beneath the surface. Saints, sinners, the differences are a matter of semantics and rather superficial.”
“Then we are agreed. I can’t help but suspect, Mrs. Breedlove, that you are taking the long way round to make a point. And in this approach, we differ. Hence the following direct question: What are you getting at?”
“When you are done with her, whatever your reasons, she will be in smithereens. And you won’t even sport a nick.”
For a moment he didn’t breathe.
Tristan betrayed nothing of what he was thinking, which was, in fact, that she may be right.
And yet.
Mrs. Breedlove’s eyes were hazel, which seemed a much too-soft, nearly dreamy color for a woman like her to have. There wasn’t a thing soft or dreamy about Mrs. Breedlove, at least not anymore.
Yes, they were alike.
He wondered about the first man to compliment her eyes, for surely someone had been the first. He was sincerely sorry if life had been unkind to her; doubtless, to wind up as Derring’s mistress, things had not gone the way she would have preferred. He had the sense that one took refuge from life in The Grand Palace on the Thames.
“Mrs. Breedlove, do you think I’m a man of whim?”
“No. Hence my concern. I suspect you are quite purposeful. But I’m not quite certain of your purpose here, at The Grand Palace on the Thames.”
“Why, for the accommodations, of course. And for the pleasure of being required to sit reading comfortably in your sitting room while the Gardner sisters stare at me.”
“Then I shall be clear. On the off chance a scrap of heart remains in the iron confines of your chest, perhaps you ought to leave her alone.”
He took a sip of his tea, now cold, and a little too strong.
Had he been obvious? This seemed inconceivable.
Or had Delilah—?
“No, she hasn’t said a word,” Mrs. Breedlove said, in answer to his unspoken question.
He wasn’t going to obfuscate. He would not admit a thing. Nor would he deny.
He merely studied her.
“I think the very fact of your advice suggests you’ve not only been dented, Mrs. Breedlove. I believe you actually care very much about her.”
For a fleeting instant her cool features registered surprise and vulnerability. She did not like being sassed out.
He thought perhaps she was reassessing him.
He almost smiled. Clearly she thought astute men were anomalies.
Perhaps they were.
“Or I’m looking out for the best interests of all of us, and I’ve grown weary of cleaning this drafty box and the nature of smithereens is that one must pick them out of the carpet or curtains forever.”
With an insouciant wave of her hand, she departed the room, leaving it somehow ten degrees colder than it had been.
“Lady Derring says that she and Mrs. Breedlove financed their boardinghouse with the proceeds of the sale of their jewelry to a pawnbroker called Reeves. We’ll need to verify this. It doesn’t yet definitively clear her of cigar smuggling. But my instincts say neither she nor her partner are involved. I had an opportunity to speak to Mrs. Breedlove this morning.”
Tristan was more and more certain that Delilah and Mrs. Breedlove were innocent of any wrongdoing. But more to the point, he hoped that they were.
Which meant he had taken a side. And he made an internal adjustment to remind himself that he was here to try to track down the source of those cigars. Not prove Delilah and Mrs. Breedlove’s innocence.
“Very well. We’ll verify it, sir. But why did they open a boardinghouse, of all things?”
“Because . . . their options for survival and thriving were limited. Most of their options involved relying on men, which they preferred not to do. Apparently men aren’t as wonderful as we think we are, or so they believe.”
Massey pressed his lips together, considering this.
He knew about Brinker. About how he’d been taken to the opposite side of London by Tristan’s men and grilled the entire way about his presence at The Grand Palace on the Thames.
That was how they’d ascertained that Brinker was a brute, not a smuggler. He’d in fact, when he was more lucid, conveyed his thanks to the famous Captain Hardy for stopping the smuggling in Kent, which was cutting into his own family’s business.
He was assured his horse would be returned to him in Kent. Which it would be. They were efficient, the blockade men. They also threatened to hand him his bollocks on a plate if Brinker ever returned to The Grand Palace on the Thames.
“Is Lady Derring right about men, guv?” Massey had clearly never considered this before. He looked troubled.
Tristan was mordantly amused.
“You’re a good man, Massey. Rest yourself.”
Massey looked relieved. Captain Hardy wasn’t one to fling compliments about lightly.
Tristan was less certain about his own relative goodness, however. He’d gotten information he needed from Lady Derring—about her jewelry—when she was most vulnerable and trusting. She’d become vulnerable and trusting in part because they had been building a certain intimacy for days. He hadn’t exactly set out to do it this way but now it all seemed knotted together—the desire and the investigation—and there was no way to undo it.
He’d always thought of himself as a man of decency and rectitude, upstanding in the pursuit of justice. He adhered to a personal code. But would a good man do that to a woman?
He now more fully understood the nature of the peril of this attraction. Inherent in it, from the beginning, was betrayal.
He knew it wouldn’t stop him from making love to her again.
Because men were just that wonderful.
And rejecting a pleasure like that—a once-in-a-lifetime gift—somehow seemed the greater sin.
“Are we on the right track, sir?” Massey asked, into the silence. “The investigation?”
Massey was tentative. As though he hardly dared ask the question.
They were both men of action. All of his men were. And the action here—the interviews, the following of guests—was beginning to feel both painstaking and aimless.
“Yes, I think so. I think we have a few pieces of the puzzle, but we cannot yet see how they fit. We just need to be thorough.”
This was enough for Massey, because there had not yet been a time when Tristan was on the wrong track. He looked somewhat relieved.
But there also had not been a time when he’d been requested to send a letter to the king to let him know of his progress, such as it was. He was due to write that letter.
“Well, if the Widow Derring is pretty, sir, perhaps to speed things up you ought to seduce her to make her tell you . . .”
Tristan’s cold stare shocked Massey speechless.
He supposed it was his own guilt that made the idea of hearing that entire sentence unbearable.
“What if someone wanted to seduce Emily to those ends?” Tristan said finally. Quietly.
Massey remained silent and still, studying Tristan. And suddenly he thought he understood.
“You remembered her name, sir,” he said gently.
Delilah spent the day sailing the choppy seas of her emotions, euphoric one moment (she’d had extraordinary sex on a settee with a gorgeous captain she scarcely knew!), appalled the next (she’d had extraordinary sex on a settee with a gorgeous captain she barely knew). She could not and did not regret it. But was this the sort of person she wanted to be? She had been gently bred, whatever that, in fact, meant, and though she’d been triumphantly shedding shoulds and oughts for some time now, shedding her night rail in the middle of the drawing room was something else altogether. Try as she might, she could not get her thoughts to congregate and mull the problem of it. Her body was still echoing from the pleasure visited upon it. It drowned out reason.
She kept hearing his voice: I need you.
She had done her chores in a feverish, abstracted state and joined Angelique for tea in the upstairs drawing room.
They both gave a start when they heard Dot dashing up the stairs. She tripped on the last one, nearly arriving on her hands and knees in the little drawing room.
“Lady Derring, Mrs. Breedlove, we’ve a very young lady what wants a place to stay. She is rather, er, fancy and frantic and demanding.” She crawled a few paces then righted herself.
It was apparent Dot’s nerves had been a bit worked by this young lady, who had probably been under their roof for a few minutes.
“By all means let’s rush to see her then,” Angelique said, her eyes cast heavenward.
Delilah shot Angelique a wry look and laid her mending aside. “Of course we’ll see a frantic young lady. Will you bring in the tea, Dot?”
On the reception room settee sat a girl who, they could see in an instant, came from a family of some means. Her turkey-red wool dress and matching pelisse were enviably smart and current, and a darling felt bonnet trimmed in darling cherries and leaves sat next to her on the settee.
She’d made herself quite at home, so it seemed.
“I can’t go through with it. I can’t! I can’t, I tell you. I’d rather die,” was how she greeted the two of them when they appeared.
Delilah suspected she’d been saying this to herself since Dot left the room.
“Of course you wouldn’t rather die, darling,” Angelique said firmly. “Whatever the ‘it’ in question is. You could always open a boardinghouse instead.”
Delilah shot her a dry look.
“You don’t know!” the girl wailed.
“I expect a man is involved,” Delilah said.
This brought the girl up short.
“How did you know that?” she asked suspiciously. “Is it true what my mother says, with age comes wisdom?”
She was wide-eyed and disingenuous.
There was a little silence.
“I say we throw her outside to the wolves,” Angelique said.
The girl flicked her uncertain blue gaze between Angelique and Delilah. She was pleasingly round, with charming little pale freckles across her nose that she probably hated, and her honey-colored hair, neatly curled and pinned, was surprisingly unmussed for one so frantic.
Delilah sat down next to her and touched her arm gently.
“Why don’t you take a breath and tell us how you’ve come to grace our establishment, Miss . . .”
“Bevan-Clark. Lucinda Bevan-Clark.”
“Miss Bevan-Clark, I am Lady Derring and this is Mrs. Angelique Breedlove.” Angelique sat down opposite them. “We are the proprietors here at The Grand Palace on the Thames. Why don’t you tell us what brings you here and what has you so upset?”
Miss Bevan-Clark took a breath. “Are either of you married?”
After a little hesitation, Delilah answered for both of them. “We are widows.”
“It’s the most awkward thing,” Miss Bevan-Clark said fervently. “He’s been my friend my entire life. But I am not in love with him. The very notion of marrying him!” She gave a shudder. “But my parents got it into their minds that we should make a match because our families are rich, you see, and well, our families would only get richer should we marry, and wouldn’t that be lovely for everyone.” She said this with great snideness. “I’m terribly afraid he’ll be so awfully disappointed because I think he’s in love with me, otherwise why would he propose? I got word from a mutual friend of ours that he intended to propose at a house party we were both meant to attend and I took it upon myself to run away from the coaching inn. I asked to be brought to the nearest boardinghouse and this is where the driver took me.”
She looked proud of this, and she really ought not be.
“Rich, you say?” Angelique said just as Delilah said, “Are you in love with someone else?”
“Well, I’d certainly like the opportunity to find out if I’m in love with someone else!” she said indignantly. “Wouldn’t you? I know you’re both a bit on in years but I daresay even now you wouldn’t turn away from the possibility of a grand romance.”
Delilah and Angelique very, very carefully did not look at each other. Neither of them was yet thirty.
They were both tempted to give her ears a slight boxing.
They could tell her a lot about the myth of romance. Delilah, in particular, could now tell her that a disappointing marriage could be stifling but magnificent sex on a boardinghouse settee with a man she hardly knew and who was not a gentleman could be in her distant future by way of compensation. The delicious soreness between her legs and a hint of whisker burn against her cheek conspired to remind her of that all day.
But it seemed impossible to say that to such an open, indignant, hopeful face.
And something about that open, hopeful face made Delilah feel just a little bit sordid. A little bit nostalgic for a time when she didn’t know all the things she knew. A little wistful that Miss Bevan-Clark could marry a friend, who knew her so well.
It wouldn’t matter, regardless. Miss Bevan-Clark would never believe them if they told her there was no such thing as romance.
“To marry a friend! I ask you. I daresay we crawled about in nappies together! Not romantic at all!”
“There are worse things than marrying a friend, Miss Bevan-Clark.”
“Is that what we should aspire to? Seizing upon something because it isn’t the ‘worst thing’?”
“Absolutely,” Angelique said as Delilah was saying, “It’s a bit more complicated than that.”
But it wasn’t as though Miss Bevan-Clark didn’t have a point.
“I have money with me! A lot of it. I can pay you whatever you like. If you let me stay for a time.”
Oh, the idiot child.
Delilah sighed. She and Angelique didn’t even have a decade on Miss Bevan-Clark, she suspected, but she suddenly felt as old as Westminster Abbey.
“Miss Bevan-Clark, how old are you?” Angelique asked.
“I shall be eighteen next April.”
“Very well,” Angelique said. “First of all, do not ever tell strangers in London that you have a lot of money. You’re fortunate that you’ve stumbled into The Grand Palace on the Thames, where we will charge you dearly but not more than what our accommodations are worth. We are quite respectable and you are safe and welcome here.” She paused. “At the moment.”
The faintest hint of a threat of eviction was a good way to keep unruly guests in line.
“All right,” Miss Bevan-Clark begrudgingly allowed. “Thank you,” she added, though the last two words sounded like a question.
“Second of all, you’re the veriest twit.”
Miss Bevan-Clark’s mouth dropped open. “Well, I never!”
“What she means is . . .” Delilah leaned forward soothingly, placatingly. Then she sat back again. “No, Mrs. Breedlove had it right the first time,” she said cheerfully. “You are indeed the veriest twit.”
Miss Bevan-Clark clapped her jaw shut. Her eyes were enormous with amazement.
“You shall be respectful if we allow you to stay with us,” Delilah said firmly. “You will speak to us with the respect in which you hold your mother, though we’re scarcely much older than you.” The word scarcely was all a matter of interpretation, of course. “We’ve experience of the world and you would do well to listen. I suspect you’ve been rather indulged until now, and now this—your parents’ insistence on marrying your friend—is the first time you’ve been challenged. And so you’ve gone to pieces like a little baby.”
There was a stunned silence.
“Well, that’s very unkind.” Miss Bevan-Clark seemed more surprised than incensed. Doubtless people had never been unkind to her before. She seemed a little pleased at the novelty of it.
“It is true, however. Buck up. Learning how to accept criticism without throwing a tantrum is how you become an adult. I don’t suppose you’re stupid. You don’t seem so, anyhow.”
Miss Bevan-Clark was clearly torn between pitching a dramatic little fit or basking a little in the compliment.
“I’m not stupid.”
Her choice of words suggested she might be speaking truth.
“I thought not.” Delilah beamed at her encouragingly, and Miss Bevan-Clark beamed in return, like a prized pupil.
“Are you here alone?” Angelique said suddenly. “This area by the docks is quite dang—” Delilah shot her a warning glare. “—erously appealing.”
“My maid, Miss Wright, is waiting outside in the hack. She thinks I’ve gone quite mad. She refused to come in.”
“Well, at least one of you is sensible,” Angelique said.
“Thank you.” Miss Bevan-Clark had Mr. Farraday’s willingness to assume that all compliments were meant for them.
“Dot, go and bring her maid in. Miss Bevan-Clark, give Dot some money to pay the hack.”
She looked startled, but she dipped into her reticule without question and pressed a handful of coins into Dot’s hand.
“Miss Bevan-Clark, have some bracing tea. Why don’t you take a moment to look over our rules and conditions?” Delilah leaned over and handed the rules to the girl. “We are not at all unsympathetic to your position, but we do not allow just anyone to stay at length at The Grand Palace on the Thames. We prefer our guests to behave like adults.”
Now Miss Bevan-Clark looked worried.
“If we do admit you as a guest, we shall make you as comfortable as you would be in your own home and treat you as family,” Angelique added.
The word family caused something like guilt and the faintest hint of yearning to flicker across Miss Bevan-Clark’s features.
Delilah and Angelique stepped outside of the room and into the opposite drawing room, and spoke in whispers.
“I don’t think we ought to mention Mr. Farraday, though the coincidence is delicious,” Delilah said. “Could there be two such twits in the world?”
“I’ve come to believe nearly anything is possible. I suppose we shall find out later this evening—I’m given to understand Mr. Farraday will be out all day, and will miss dinner, but not chess with Delacorte. But what shall we do? We could have angry parents and Bow Street Runners convene upon us if someone sensible, like Miss Wright, sends a message to them from here.”
“How much do Bow Street Runners make? Do you think they would like to stay here?” Delilah said.
Angelique stifled a laugh.
“And if we allow her to stay here and her parents discover that young Farraday is in the same place, they’ll assume they ran off together,” Delilah mused. “She’ll be ruined, while he’ll go on to make another match unscathed. Or he’ll marry her out of honor and they shall both be miserable.”
“Perhaps. But the odds of having a miserable life are about the same for nearly everyone. One just never knows. They like each other, or so she says, and many marriages begin under worse circumstances. We can address complications as they arise. We cannot pitch her out onto the street tonight. More to the point, we will make ten pounds if she stays.”
“You make an excellent point, Angelique.”
“We must compel her to send a message to her parents informing them of her safety.”
“Perhaps they’re meant for each other,” Delilah surmised. “And they don’t realize it.”
“Is anyone meant for each other? Or are we all just rationalizing accidents of fate?”
It was a very good question, and one she ought to keep in mind should she be tempted to fall again into Captain Hardy’s arms.