“He looks like a bored lion lounging amidst a flock of geese. Tolerating the fuss long enough to decide which one of us he intends to snap up in his jaws.”
Miss Violet Redmond peered over the top of her fan at the newly minted Earl of Ardmay and issued this verdict to three people: the lovely blonde Hart sisters, Millicent and Amy, who breathlessly hung on her every word, and to the married Lady Peregrine, who suffered torments when Violet was the center of attention. Which, as the beautiful, legendarily capricious daughter of the wealthy and powerful Mr. Isaiah Redmond, she invariably was.
Which is no doubt why the married Lady Peregrine said, “Jaws, Miss Redmond? La, I’d rather snap him up between my legs.”
The Harts hid gasps and wicked giggles behind their fans.
Violet hid a yawn.
They had taken up a prime viewing position near the ratafia in Lord and Lady Throckmorton’s ballroom. It was a crush, as usual. The Harts hovered near Violet because they wanted to be her. Lady Peregrine hovered near Violet because she wanted to be seen with her. As usual, even in the crush of bodies in the ballroom, Violet was profoundly aware of presences and absences. Her parents, Isaiah and Fanchette Redmond, were here, as was her brother Jonathan. Her best friend, Cynthia, and her brother Miles, who’d lately married, had remained in Pennyroyal Green, Sussex.
Of course, the biggest absence of all was her oldest brother Lyon, the ton’s golden boy and the Redmond heir, who had disappeared a year ago, taking with him the clothes on his back and a little rosewood box he’d owned since he was a boy. A box he’d made himself.
And the reason behind his absence was all too present: Olivia Eversea, eldest daughter of the Everseas of Pennyroyal Green, ancient if civil enemies of the Redmonds, stood across the room, looking slim and pale and earnest in green. Olivia had always been earnest. Fiery, even. Given over to working passionately for causes. She’d even distributed anti-slavery pamphlets in the Pig & Thistle in Pennyroyal Green, to the tolerant bewilderment of the pub’s proprietor, Ned Hawthorne.
Olivia was here, and Lyon was not. Because Olivia had broken Lyon’s heart. And everyone said this fulfilled the curse: an Eversea and a Redmond were destined to fall in love once per generation, with disastrous results.
Violet decided she best stop looking at Olivia lest her gaze scorch a hole in the woman’s gown.
“We mustn’t look as though we are gossiping.” Miss Amy Hart was new enough to the ton to think it ought to be said.
“Of course we must look as though we are gossiping. How else will we keep everyone frightened and intrigued?”
Everyone agreed with vigorous nods, and everyone missed Violet’s irony.
“Why a lion?” Millicent wanted to know. “Why not a bear, or a wildebeest?”
“A wildebeest has hooves, you ninny,” her sister, Amy, corrected wearily. “It’s hardly a romantic creature. Though I’m not convinced he’s a romantic creature, either. The scowl looks as though it might be permanent. They say he’s a savage.” She gave a delighted, theatrical shiver.
“I know why! It’s his hair. It’s…tawny.” Millicent sighed the word.
“Tawny?” Lady Peregrine turned to her in feigned alarm. “Did you actually say tawny, Millicent? Well, I can’t say I didn’t warn you that poetry would make porridge of your brains, and now here you are using a word like tawny and I do believe I heard you use the word gossamer as well just the other night to describe the morning mist—is this not true?”
Millicent hung her head in shamed confirmation.
“My dear, his hair is brown, and he has too much of it. But—of course. I see the problem. You’ve lines here, Millicent”—Lady Peregrine pointed to the flawless corners of her own eyes—“from squinting, I daresay. Perhaps it’s just that you’ve begun to need a quizzing glass to see him clearly?”
They all turned speculative gazes on poor Millicent, whose fingers flew up to pet at those imaginary lines.
“Honestly, do take another look at him—squint if you need to, we shall none of us mind if you do, isn’t that so, ladies? You’ll see that he’s the veriest brute. So uncommonly large. He is American-bred they say. Surely his true parents were a bear and an Indian.”
“Oh, now who’s fanciful?” Millicent was indignant.
“The title is much wasted on him since rumor has it he doesn’t plan to spend time on English soil, but the King does have his whims. What do you think, Violet?”
Violet, who knew the goal of all of this clever talk about the earl was to impress and shock her because everyone knew she was so very difficult to impress and shock, and who was in truth so bored, so bored, so tired of endless balls and parties and everything about them she thought perhaps her internal organs might grind to a halt from lack of stimulation, and the only thing keeping her awake was a keen yet quite impersonal hatred of the women who stood near her, was thinking:
Blue, possibly.
Everything in the ballroom gleamed aggressively. Light from legions of candles and lamps ricocheted off silks and taffeta and jewels and polished brass and marble, creating an obscuring glare. But when the new Earl of Ardmay had glanced toward them his eyes had caught and flicked light like faceted jewels. They must be blue.
“They say he did something heroic to earn the title,” was all she said.
The rumor abided; the specifics, however, remained elusive. The extinct title His Majesty George IV had resurrected, dangled before the Everseas and Redmonds, and then in a stunning about-face, bestowed upon a mysterious and allegedly American-reared, English-born Captain Flint. Doubtless it amused the King to seize an opportunity to keep the powerful Eversea and Redmond families humbled and in check, for it seemed so little else could.
She moved her fan beneath her chin in languid, carefully neutral sweeps. Her sharp-eyed mother, presently engaged in conversation with a sturdy, be-turbaned Lady Windemere, would know instantly if she was fomenting mischief among the bloods who gazed with calf-eyed if wary admiration at her from all corners of the room, hoping for, dreading, an invitation signaled by her fan. The betting books at White’s were filled with wildly hopeful conjectures about what Violet Redmond might do next, because it had been an intolerably long time since Violet had done something epically, deliciously rash, such as threaten to cast herself down a well during an argument with a suitor and then get a leg over before she was pulled back by the elbows, or challenge a man to a duel. Between times her manners were faultless, exquisite, innate, which made the swerving from them all the more invigoratingly shocking.
Only the foolhardy wagered who might finally be a match for her. Many had attempted suit. All had failed. Some had tried and failed spectacularly. To the bloods of the ton, Violet Redmond was El Dorado. And she was terrifying.
The new earl was in truth tall but not uncommonly so, she assessed. A few other men in the room would likely be able to look him evenly in the eye.
But he was large.
And whereas her brother Miles Redmond was large in the manner of, oh, a cliff—he had an indestructible quality yet somehow seemed an integral part of the landscape and could therefore occasionally be overlooked—there was nothing unobtrusive about the Earl of Ardmay. It was difficult to place a finger precisely why. His hands were folded behind his back; one knee was casually bent. Most of the other men in the room struck similar poses while they held conversations. His clothes were beautifully cut and unimaginative, fawn for the trousers, white for the cravat, black for the coat, subtle pewter stripes on the waistcoat.
But his palpable physical confidence, an animal comfort in his own skin, issued a subliminal challenge to all the men present.
Not to mention profoundly disturbed the accepted notion of attractiveness of the assembled ladies.
In short, he was as unsettling as a Trojan horse wheeled into the center of the ballroom. And he most certainly did not belong to the English landscape.
“That scowl…he does look like a savage,” Violet mused. “He ought to try smiling. I wonder if he has all of his teeth. Have any of you been close enough to see?”
It was determined that no one among them had yet seen the earl’s teeth, and that perhaps one of them ought to be dispatched to take a look, or to even dance with him, if this could be arranged.
“I like the scowl. He looks as though he’s squinting into the sun while standing on the prow of a deck with the sea breezes blowing his hair back.” This was Amy Hart, dreamily.
“But bad-tempered men make terrible dancers.” Millicent said this.
Violet couldn’t allow this particular inanity to pass. She turned slowly to stare at Millicent. “For heaven’s sake,” she said, heavily pained.
Millicent looked suitably abashed.
“Oh! Do let me tell what I know about the size of men’s thighs and what it means about their prowess,” Lady Peregrine insisted, as three entire seconds had passed since she’d been the center of attention. And the Harts swiveled their heads toward her and leaned in, because Lady Peregrine, being young and married, knew things they did not.
And on they buzzed, like wasps about rotting fruit, until Violet felt just as somnolent as though a picnic sun truly was beating down on her, and wished herself far away. Not too long ago she’d gone with her brother Jonathan and two friends—Cynthia and Lord Argosy—to have their fortunes told by the Gypsies who camped on the outskirts of Pennyroyal Green. She’d of course been told she would be taking a long trip across the water. And then the Gypsy girl Martha Heron had shouted something nonsensical. A French word. Likely a name. At the time, Violet had greeted all of this with rolled eyes. Martha Heron the Gypsy, it was generally agreed, was both a looby and quite a bit too flirtatious for her own good.
But at the moment Violet conceded a long trip to anywhere away from this ballroom would have suited her.
“Now, for a truly attractive, very refined man, one must look to the earl’s first mate. Have you seen him? Probably a French aristocrat who lost everything in the revolution and forced to serve a savage now, for he’s titled! His name is Lord Lavay.” Lady Peregrine was eager to share superior knowledge of the ton’s newcomers.
Violet jerked her head toward Lady Peregrine and fixed her with a stare so strange and brilliant the color drained from Lady Peregrine’s cheeks.
They all watched Violet with breathless, anticipatory glee.
“S-something on your mind, my dear?” Lady Peregrine managed after a moment. Her breath seemed to be held.
“Will you please repeat his name?” Violet was all careful politeness.
Lady Peregrine gathered her composure and began to quiver with delicious anticipation of scandalous behavior.
“Oh, I can do better, Miss Redmond,” she purred. “Would you care for an introduction?”
“They look like hyenas bent over a carcass,” Flint said by way of greeting when Lord Lavay returned bearing a cup of ratafia.
Lavay followed the earl’s gaze across the ballroom to the ring of young women. “Your figurative carcass, it so happens,” Lord Lavay, his first mate, confirmed cheerily. “I overheard a good deal while I was fetching this swill. In fact, she said—”
“Which ‘she’?”
“The pretty blonde.” Lavay gestured vaguely with his chin.
“They’re all pretty,” Flint said irritably. And they were. All of them uniformly pale, clean, scented, groomed, genteel. Pretty, pretty, pretty. The English version of pretty. Every country had a version of pretty, and he’d partaken of perhaps more than his share of them.
“The one with very pale blonde hair—east of the entrance, near that emasculated-looking statue of some…Roman, I think? She’s wearing blue and has a feather poking up out of her headpiece? As I was helping myself to this…this…” Words failed him as he sorrowfully examined his fussy ratafia, but he rallied. “…I heard her say, and I fear I do quote, that she’d heard that the size of a man’s thighs was directly related to the size of his—the word she used was ‘blessing,’ but the inflection made her meaning unmistakable—and if that were indeed true then the new Earl of Ardmay’s blessing surely put Courtenay’s to shame.”
They immediately spent a moment in bemused silence in honor of the perilous little paradox that was the English female. They seemed as fluttery and brittle as their fans; their conversation—outwardly—was exquisitely polite and demure. And yet they used those very same fans to signal shockingly provocative invitations across ballrooms, and their stays lifted their bosoms up out of their bodices like pearls presented on pillows for a pasha to inspect. One gaze directed lingeringly at the wrong bosom and an inebriated, over-bred lordling would begin shouting about pistols at dawn. One right word and lingeringly directed gaze and one could be invited to hike up a handsome aristocratic widow’s delicate dress in an alcove at a dinner party and partake of the pleasures that lay between her thighs.
Flint had been reminded of both of these things in his first few days on English soil. He’d apologized in the first instance and demurred with polite regret in the second.
“I don’t know which one Courtenay is,” Lavay added on a hush, since it was now impossible not to wonder who Courtenay was.
While Flint had met with the King regarding his mission and attended several tedious dinners in his honor attended by men who unsurprisingly begrudged him the resurrected title—born an English bastard, raised an American rogue—Lavay had spent considerably more of his time in the more hospitable environment of a brothel called The Velvet Glove.
Flint spared a moment of longing for his Moroccan mistress Fatima, who had eyes like melted chocolate and a nose that ended in a hook and straight black hair that went on for ells and ells. Fatima would crook the finger of one hand while parting curtains between her sitting room and incense-scented bedroom with the other—this was the extent of her symbolic communication. And then she would clamber atop him, or he atop her, and they would spend an unambiguously sweaty and delightful afternoon. It was Flint’s firm opinion that societies lacking enough hard, honest work to do became needlessly intricate.
The truth was: At the age of thirty-two, after traveling the seas for nigh on two decades, after having dined and slept in ships and prisons and palaces, having bargained for his life with princes and rogues, having captured criminals for bounties and made and lost more than one fortune, Captain Flint, mixed-breed bastard, privateer and trader, newly styled Earl of Ardmay, belonged everywhere and nowhere. He danced to no man’s tune but his own. The men in this ballroom could go to the devil for all he cared. He wanted what they had likely taken for granted their entire lives: an opportunity to build a dynasty. Something of his very own, something to belong to.
He’d need land, a fortune, and a wife. The land he coveted was in New Orleans, Fatima would do for the wife, as she was at least dedicated to his pleasure and comfort, but the necessary fortune remained elusive, and the seller of the New Orleans plantation was growing restive.
A fortnight ago, everything had changed.
He ironically cursed again his fatal flaw, which is how he’d come to be in this ballroom in the first place: He never could leave well enough alone when it came to rescuing. He’d been anchored in Le Havre, wondering how to restore his badly depleted fortunes after a storm damaged his cargo of silk, when he’d rescued a drunken fool of a young gentleman from footpads in Le Havre. As it turned out, the grateful man was a beloved cousin of Lady Conyngham, the King’s mistress. Word of Flint’s heroics—which amounted to nothing more than swift swordplay and some menacing growls, really, though there were two footpads and one of Flint—reached her ear through Flint’s acquaintance, the Comte Hebert, in Le Havre.
Which is how the King of England had learned about Flint and his talent for bounty collecting, and he’d seen an opportunity to both ingratiate himself with his mistress and to solve a sticky little problem on the high seas. He proposed to resurrect a grand English earldom and bestow it upon Flint. All Flint had to do capture a pirate called Le Chat who’d been robbing and sinking merchant ships, a number of them English, up and down the coast of Europe. The title was his to keep, as were the rich farmlands attached to it, lands that would provide a steady income—as well as require an enormous income to maintain.
The bounty was entirely dependent upon delivering the pirate into justice.
It was a diabolical proposition. It was a thing of beauty, really: practical, capricious, and cruel.
Flint greatly admired it.
And Flint rejected it.
Not since he was a lad of ten years old, when Captain Moreheart of The Steadfast had given an abandoned boy a home, a purpose, and the knowledge he’d needed to become the man he was today, had he danced to anyone’s tune but his own. He didn’t intend to start now, even if the King of England was the one playing the hornpipe. Even if, in one fell swoop, it held the potential to give him everything he wanted.
Of course, if he failed, it could destroy him.
The King wheedled. Flint demurred. The King cajoled. Flint demurred.
The King, astonished, resorted to issuing subtle threats. Flint, amused and unafraid, demurred.
When he heard the King had actually thrown a wee tantrum, he began to thoroughly enjoy the game.
And then Le Chat sank The Steadfast.
The news reached Flint in evening while he sat with his crew in a pub in Le Havre. He’d gone still, his hand tightly curled around a pint of ale, roars of bawdy laughter eddying around him. He was stunned to realize the news felt like taking a shot to the gut.
Steel-spined Captain Moreheart, going gray and gouty but still shrewd, ferociously opinionated, dignified…forced at swordpoint into a launch by that damned pirate and floated with his men to an almost certain death on a rough sea.
While behind him the pirate blew The Steadfast to smithereens with cannon fire.
This was why he agreed to become the Earl of Ardmay.
And now those great tracts of English lands, a century-old estate included, dangled like both a carrot before a donkey and like a Sword of Damocles.
A half hour ago the press of the ballroom and his mission and the memory of Moreheart sent Flint strolling restlessly to the doors on the terrace to open them an inch. Outside the wind was howling like a cornered, wounded animal and smelled of coal-sullied London and sea. His schooner The Fortuna was anchored out there. Calmer winds would likely prevail tomorrow, and they would sail as early as possible with his small but loyal—and gleefully violent when necessary—crew.
Well, loyal save one. He might be an earl now, but the duties of a captain were myriad, mundane, and often maddening.
“Did you manage to find a replacement for Rathskill in between, shall we say, bouts of ecstasy at The Velvet Glove?” Rathskill, the boob of a cook’s mate needed to go before Hercules, the cook, finally lost all patience and sent him through the meat grinder. Rathskill was lazy, he was sloppy, and they’d all stared in morbid fascination at the biscuit crumbs clinging to his lips while he’d lied about stealing rations with his hand over his heart. He’d grossly exaggerated his experience in a ship’s mess, making fools of both Flint and Lavay.
Neither of them countenanced being made to feel a fool. Ever.
Lavay sighed. “I spoke to a few men at the docks but naught were suitable. Perhaps we’ll have better luck in Le Havre. We can sail at least that far without a cook’s mate.”
“Hercules will be…unhappy.”
Unhappy seemed too pale a word for what Hercules would be. Their cook was Greek, diminutive, and he expressed displeasure…operatically. All of his emotions were operatic.
“Speaking of unhappy, Flint, your scowl could wilt flowers at fifty paces. This is a ballroom, and do recall it’s a title you’ve been handed, for God’s sake, not a Turkish prison sentence. God knows I have done my best to impart my gentlemanly ways to you—”
Flint snorted.
“—but you really ought to try smiling. One of those women in fact described you as a ‘savage.’”
Savage. Flint went still. Even after all these years, the word still touched between his shoulder blades like the cold point of a rapier.
“Which one?” he said sharply.
“The brunette—the one in blue.”
Flint found the brunette in question easily. She was part of that group but seemed separate somehow, limned in stillness. Her hair was dressed intricately up; a pair of calculated ringlets dangled to her chin; her features were fine apart from a decidedly lush mouth; her dress a singular shade of blue, cut low enough to reveal the tops of a more than acceptable bosom above which dangled a single bright jewel of some kind, strung on a chain. Her throat was long. Her fan flapped below her chin as disinterestedly as if the hand holding it belonged to someone else altogether.
But her eyes were brilliantly alive, and the corner of that lush mouth was dented with wry contempt.
For herself? For her companions? For everyone in the room?
Funny, but Flint was distantly reminded of himself.
“That one is bored, Lavay. And I’m willing to wager there’s nothing more dangerous to a man’s health than a bored, spoiled, wealthy young Englishwoman.”
“I won’t take that wager, Flint. I’d like to see the morrow.”
The woman in question and the pretty be-plumed blonde detached themselves from the group and began to move rather purposefully in their direction, joined by another English gentleman en route.
“Well, bloody hell.” Lavay was amused. “Try to look civil, for a change, you scoundrel, because I feel we’re about to be compelled to dance with Englishwomen after all.”
“My apologies, Lavay,” Flint murmured. “I’m sure it has everything to do with my majestic thighs.”