Almost a Gentleman (8 page)

And no more anxious wondering whether she'd offended some pretentious dowager or stuffy old lord by speaking too directly or arguing a point too well. Phizz always won his arguments, making mincemeat of the stupid, stuffy, and pretentious alike. Phoebe had always needed to be on the lookout for one of her husband's rages, but Phizz had only Phizz to please.

Best of all perhaps, Phizz Marston had the newspaper to himself at breakfast.

Her eye fell to the bottom of the page, where a brief but respectful article described the minority position in Parliament. For it seemed that even though this latest Enclosure Act had passed, it had done so by a surprisingly narrow margin. The reporter attributed the close vote to "the quiet, reasoned eloquence of David Hervey, eighth earl of Linseley, who spoke modestly and masterfully of 'a decent, traditional England that pledged all due reverence to its commons and its community.' "

The article quoted a few more phrases—
nicely turned as well
, Phoebe thought—and then gave its attention to the gentleman's elegant bearing and style of address: "… a tall, powerful man, who seems to bring the countryside into the hall with him. At courteous ease with his noble peers, one imagines him more truly at home in his bounteous fields and among the yeomen whose rights he seeks to protect."

One imagines him…

For a moment Phoebe didn't look anything like Phizz Marston. For a moment only, before she caught herself and rearranged her features into their accustomed mask.

"A bit preciously wrought, that bit of reportage," she said aloud. There was no one in the room to hear her, but it wouldn't hurt to rehearse. Even though none of the dandies at White's cared about agricultural policy, they would all have noted that Lord Linseley possessed an original and dramatic style and bearing. Which Phizz would be called to pass judgement upon.

"Oh, quite elegant." Her icy dandy's voice echoed in the empty breakfast room. "Spent an hour endeavoring to tie my cravat like his this morning, without quite achieving his miraculous fluidity and simplicity of line."

And the hell of it, she thought, was that this was quite nearly the truth. For all her resolve to forget about him, it had been Lord Linseley whom she'd seen in the pier glass this morning, during a particularly long and challenging session of disguising herself as a man.

Crossing a brilliantly polished foot over a well-tailored knee, she wiped a miniscule bit of dust from the toe of her boot with her napkin. Not that it mattered—she'd be tramping through mud this afternoon anyway and would have to return home for a change of clothing before setting out to White's. Tramping through the mud… the thought brought an involuntary smile to her lips. For after three years, she still reveled in having a man's freedom of the London streets.

She had an important and delightful errand to do, in fact—one that ought to take her mind off this troublesome man. Reluctantly, she corrected herself.
This
good
and decent man
, she thought,
damn his beautiful dark blue eyes
.

"Well, you fought the good fight and that's what matters in the end." Admiral Wolfe tried to sound bluff and hearty over luncheon.

Lord Linseley put down his coffee cup and allowed himself a short, dry laugh.

"And if England had fought the good fight but lost the battle at Trafalgar?"

"Not the same thing, man, not the same at all. You'll live to fight another day. And you gained adherents to your cause. The newspapers…"

"The newspapers seemed more interested in my 'elegant bearing' than in my cause. As though I'd made that speech in order to advance myself in the marriage mart."

He was exhausted, numbed by the futility of his endeavor, and furious at the shallow senselessness of the whole event. But after all, he thought, what could he have reasonably expected from gentlemen so ignorant of the land and the people who worked it?

It was time to get back to the country and do the best he could to repair the damages. Time to leave this corrupt city that cared for nothing but style, wealth, and pleasure, and had forgotten its roots. Time to turn his back on Lord Crashaw. And to forget about Phizz Marston.

But before he could leave London he had an errand to do.

The house at Three Fountain Court was shabby, the street itself rutted and muddy, without the raised wooden walkways that made walking easier in London's better districts. The tired-looking old lady who answered Lord Linseley's knock at the door smiled sweetly through wrinkles that years of care had etched on her face.

She'd read the morning newspapers too, and commended him for his "angelic" words in the "vicious" Parliament.

Unfortunately, though, her husband was currently entertaining another guest. But if Lord Linseley would be so good as to return in an hour, Mr. Blake would be happy to see him, and to show him the latest of his prophetic words and engravings.

The tavern just up the street, she added rather vaguely, was comfortable enough.

David had bowed and shaken her hand, bidding Mrs. Blake tell her husband that he'd return in an hour, and smiling to himself at the old lady's serene assurance that a peer of the realm would be happy to wait attendance upon her husband, a simple engraver.

Still, she was right, he thought, sipping watered ale at the Coal Hole Tavern a bit later. He'd wait all day if asked. He supposed the tavern was "comfortable enough," if one applied a very liberal definition to the notion of comfort. No matter. He'd endure considerably more discomfort than hard bench and bad ale, for the opportunity to buy a hand-colored book or manuscript by one of the most gifted and eccentric artists that England—or the world—had yet produced.

Hardly a student of the arts, David nonetheless found himself enthralled by Mr. Blake's strange poems and illustrations—of angels and biblical patriarchs, mystical beasts and meek, frightened orphans and urchins. A world unto itself and yet a familiar one, rendered in assured line and glowing color: muddy, filthy, corrupt London somehow reshaping itself and arising from Mr. Blake's imagination as a new Jerusalem.

He consulted his pocket watch. Yes, an hour had passed. He gazed out the window at the house where the Blakes rented their poor two rooms. And indeed, the door of Number Three swung open to reveal a gentleman taking his leave. David gazed intently at the man's gracefully crooked arm, a precious package carefully tucked beneath it. It seemed a book by the size and shape of it. He reached into his pocket for some coins to pay for his drink as he watched the man bid Mrs. Blake good-bye at the front door.

At first he felt only envy and resentment. What marvel had this gentleman purchased that he, David, might have taken home to admire and contemplate during his solitary evenings at Linseley Manor? Mr. Blake couldn't afford to have his work widely published. He created very small editions: some pieces were unique.

But on second thought, David knew that his initial response had simply been a cover for a far more distressing recognition—that the slender, simply dressed gentleman striding energetically and exuberantly through the muddy street was none other than Mr. Marston.

Energy
, Mr. Blake had written,
is Eternal Delight
.

And
Exuberance is Beauty
.

There was no doubt about it and no other word for it. Marston was beautiful.

David stared in a sort of trance: the pure perception overwhelmed him with shamed rapture. So these were the pleasures of vice, he thought. But the uninhibited moment soon passed, to be followed by his sure regret that he'd never abandon himself to such desires.

What was it Mr. Blake had once told him about vice?

What are called vices in the natural world are the highest sublimities in the spiritual world.

Which is all very well, David told himself, for some cracked genius. But my world
is
the natural world, dammit, and not some mad, impossible artist's paradise. And in
my
world we don't do things like that.

He paid for his ale and stood uncertainly at the doorway of the tavern.

Marston was strolling easily down the street. In another moment he'd reach the tavern. It would be easy, David thought, simply to turn his back as the young man passed. No need, after all, to greet him outside of Polite Society. Of course, it might be a trifle ignoble.
Ignoble
? Bloody hell, it would be gutless, unmanly, and entirely unworthy of himself to avoid saluting a gentleman of his acquaintance.

It would also be admitting that his passions were stronger than he was.

And anyway, he found that he couldn't have turned away even if he'd wanted to.

"Mr. Marston."

Was that a hint of a blush on the young man's meticulously shaven cheeks? No, probably just the effect of a brisk wind blowing through the street.

"Lord Linseley. Good afternoon, sir. And what a surprise to find you here. Don't tell me that you've been set to wait in the Blake family anteroom."

A quick, firm handshake. And then the maddening half smile that had haunted the margins of David's thoughts since the night at Almack's.

"Yes, Mrs. Blake sent me here."

"She'd set the Angel Gabriel himself to waiting at the Coal Hole if her husband wasn't quite ready to see him. Oh, but I've forgotten to congratulate you, sir, upon your fine speech in the House of Lords."

"Ah. Yes. Th-thank you, Mr. Marston."

David had had a slight stammer as a child. But he'd lost it completely in early adolescence. He hadn't thought about it for years, hadn't given it a moment's care even as he'd rehearsed his speech.

Absurd, he thought, to be so reduced, and in the eyes of a trivial, if beautiful, youth who lived for nothing but corrupt London style. Still, he found himself unaccountably pleased that Marston had known about the speech.

Even though, he reminded himself, Marston probably cared more for the parliamentary reporter's mannered prose than for the issues involved.

"I wouldn't have thought, Mr. Marston…"

"That a dandy would attend to the results of a boring vote on agricultural policy, my lord?"

"Well, yes, actually. Something like that. Seems rather a dull business for someone like you."

The two attractive gentlemen—the older one a well set up forty-year-old, the younger one slimmer and more carefully attired—stared curiously at each other in the midst of the shabby street. A sharp wind off the Thames ruffled their hair and sent bits of ash and urban filth swirling about their legs.

"And I, sir, must confess to a bit of surprise…"

David grinned. "That a stuffy country squire would take an interest in so rare a creature as Mr. Blake?"

Their eyes met. And then they both looked quickly away.

"Well, you must agree that he's a bit of a minority taste."

"Perhaps I'm fated always to find myself in the minority." David grimaced. "Still, I always visit Mr. Blake when I'm in Town. I wanted to be sure to see him before I escape back to Lincolnshire, for he's this city's chief attraction for me. I responded to his work immediately when I first saw it, quite by accident one day in a tiny gallery that I'd ducked into to avoid a sudden rainstorm."

Phoebe nodded emphatically, with a lack of irony completely unbefitting Phizz Marston. "I was introduced to him at Lady Caroline Lamb's some months ago. She's taken him up, I'm sure, partly for the amusement of his quaintness. But I don't find him quaint. I think he's a genius, though his view of things is so eccentric that he sometimes takes my breath away."

What in the world am 1 doing
? For it certainly wasn't Mr. Blake who was taking her breath away at the moment.

A cordial nod to Lord Linseley would have been sufficient. A bow more than enough. Shaking his hand and engaging him in enthusiastic conversation was excessive, to say the least.

Mr. Blake, she remembered, had once written that
the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom
. But Mr. Blake wasn't a woman trying to preserve a perilous deception.

And I'm in deeper danger of dropping my mask entirely, she told herself sternly, every moment I stand here conversing with him.

It was bad enough that she couldn't cease gazing at his fine face and powerful physique. Or how much pleasure she took in his evident appreciation of Mr. Marston's elegant looks.

What was worse was that she was evidently coming to
like
him. Of course, she would probably feel a similar affinity with anyone who admired Mr. Blake's work as she did. But there was also his brave stand in Parliament: she couldn't help but respect him and his beliefs. And she wanted his respect as well.

She wanted to continue this conversation, to tell him more about the astonishing illustrated
Book of Job
she'd just purchased. And to hear more of his thoughts and observations—on anything he might wish to tell her. She wanted to know him.

Perhaps, she thought, he might like to have a drink with her in the tavern. After all, a gentleman
could
invite another gentleman for half an hour of intellectual conversation, even in such raffish surroundings. And this might be her last opportunity before he escaped back to Lincolnshire…