Anne Barbour (4 page)

CHAPTER SIX

Lord Quinton was a man of regular habits: he habitually drank and gamed and whored all night, then retired at dawn to sleep through the day until time to embark upon another bacchanal. He was a man of libertine propensities, a gambler and a wastrel who lived on his wits, who had corrupted countless women and thrice killed his man in a duel; a buck of the first head who had sampled every vice not once but many times, in every variation possible, and with such utter boredom as to make his fellow reprobates appear rank amateurs.

Heads swiveled in his direction. People whispered as he passed. It amused Quin — as much as anything amused him — to be universally despaired of, envied and disliked. All this at a mere four-and-thirty. Just think how much he might accomplish before he stuck his spoon in the wall.

Moxley’s wasn’t the sort of establishment Lord Quinton normally frequented. He was accustomed to more raffish company. However,
Moxley’s was rapidly gaining a reputation as a place where one could lose a large amount of money in a short space of time.
In the furtherance of his ambition to gamble away the entirety of his vast fortune, Quin would leave no stone unturned.
The female employees were a nice touch.

Too, he was curious about Mrs. Moxley, who was almost as beloved of the gossipmongers as he was himself. He spied her immediately he entered the supper room.

He had forgotten how tall she was. Tall and lush and goddess-like with a bosom that beggared description; red-gold hair that, unbound, would tumble to her waist; sapphire eyes so unfathomable that one or another (or several) of her husbands had declared a desire to drown in their depths.

She was in animated conversation with a younger woman who could only be a relative. Loversall women drew the gaze and held it, possessing an innate sensuality that made the beholders’ blood run warm.

Most beholders’ blood, at any rate. Quin was exempt.

He moved further into the room. Mrs. Moxley glanced up, saw him, and looked as shocked as if she had set eyes upon a ghost. She’d changed, he thought. Once she hadn’t worn dignity wrapped around her like a shroud.

Would he now become the subject of her conversation? Lord Quinton was the sort of man mamas warned damsels against, it being generally agreed he was the greatest blackguard alive. There were additionally rumors he was pox’d.

The latter was untrue. The former might well be correct. Quin approached the drink table. As he recalled the occasion, which wasn’t all that clearly, Mina had emptied a chamber pot over his head the last time they met.

What was her last name then? Chickester? Ward? Memory eluded him, as memory frequently did, a circumstance for which Quin was more often grateful than not. He turned away from the table, a glass of burgundy in his hand, only to draw up sharply before he walked smack into the woman who stepped into his path.

The woman who mere moments ago had been speaking with Mina. The top of her head reached barely to his chin.

She dimpled at him. “Hello. I’m the Contessa— Ah, Prudence Loversall. That is, I am calling myself Prudence because I spent ten miserable years being prudent and chaste. Cousin Wilhelmina says if I have the sense of a gnat I’ll avoid you like the plague.”

 “You should listen to your cousin,” Quin replied.

“Just because a person is older — and Cousin Wilhelmina is
much
older! — doesn’t mean she has a better understanding.” Boldly, Prudence — or, not-Prudence — clutched his arm. Though normally he would have, Quin did not shake her off, his responses rendered sluggish by ingestion of
a large amount of that beverage commonly known as Strip-Me-Naked or Blue Ruin. Too, he
was bemused by the notion of a prudent, chaste Loversall.

He was additionally distracted by the notion of Mina Loversall grown old.

 “So you are the Black Baron!” his captor continued. “
It is Fate that I should meet you now, when I have decided I must broaden my understanding of the world. I am seven-and-twenty, you see, and have not yet done anything depraved.”

Quin raised his glass, and drank. Females frequently vied for his favors. He was amazed (if he could still be amazed) that so many were as bent on their destruction as he was himself.

This female was still talking. “I am a married woman, so I am not entirely without experience. Such as it was! A wife is not supposed to have
cravings,
I credit. I was vastly disappointed — but that is beside the point. You
are a man who understands
affaires de coeur,
and grand passions, and worlds well lost for love.”

If Mina Moxley was banked fires, her cousin was a pile of kindling in search of a match. Lord Quinton had no desire to burn his fingers. “No,” he said.

She tilted her head. “Whyever not?”

Quin was getting a headache. He really should refrain from combining burgundy with gin.
“I prefer rigidly virtuous young women who are ripe to be debauched.”

Her blue eyes widened. “Are you truly so wicked?”

Quin reflected upon the orgies he’d attended. The whores he’d tumbled. The virgins he’d defiled.

The men he’d killed.

The young married woman he had seduced on a wager, who rather than face her cuckolded husband had hanged herself.

He had won that wager. Others, he had lost. They all ran together in a blur of endless days and nights fuelled by opium and alcohol.

He said, with rare sincerity, “I am.”

“Excellent!” She dimpled at him and resumed her attack. “And
I
am
rigidly virtuous. Or I was.
If I am to go into a nunnery — or even if I’m not — I must first be despoiled. And if I am to be despoiled, I wish it to be by my own hand, or by a hand of my own choosing, and not by someone else.”

Quin had no little experience with nunneries, but doubted those were the sort of establishment his accoster had in mind. There had been a certain abbess—

He couldn’t recall which flesh-pot she had presided over. Lady, ladybird or laced mutton, he mused, it all came down to the same thing in the end.
Across the room, Mina was speaking with a young dandy in salmon-colored moleskin trousers and a coat with collar raised so high behind it would have better become a horse.

His companion cleared her throat. “I don’t think you perfectly grasp the situation. Loversall
women cannot resist the call of passion. We give our all for love.
Oh, pray don’t be difficult! I haven’t much time. It is most important that before Paolo finds me I am ruined.
”

A brief spark of curiosity flared in the alcohol-soaked recesses of Quin’s brain. “Paolo?”

Not-Prudence leaned closer. “Never mind. Under the circumstances, perhaps you should call me Zoe.”

She paused, expectantly.
The woman sounded quite mad.

Loversalls, in Quin’s experience, were all a little bit mad.

The madwoman wanted him to rid her of her virtue. He could not count how many times he had been confronted by females hoping he would rid them of their virtue.

No wonder he was bored.

Quin detached himself. “I believe that I should not.”

She pouted. “Oh, but why?”

Quin smoothed away the creases left by her fingers on his sleeve. “Because, my dear, you are neither rigidly virtuous nor young.” Leaving the lady with her mouth hanging unflatteringly agape, he walked away.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Sunlight streamed through the linen-draped windows of the morning room, which was in disarray, not unlike its owner, who was wearing scuffed slippers and a dove-grey morning dress, her curls escaping already from an untidy chignon. The window hangings dangled askew, and the furnishings were disarranged.

Grace the cat had taken refuge under the sofa upon which Mrs. Moxley sat, with Nell on her lap, and jam on her nose. The merest tip of the cat’s tail protruded. Periodically, it twitched.

“Sit still!” said Mina, as she tried once more to connect the slice of bread and jam she held with Nell’s open mouth. “You said you were hungry. You specifically asked for jam.”

“Bah!” retorted Nell, who at her tender age had already discovered the peculiarly feminine pleasure of changing her mind. “Bah bah bah bah bah!”

“There is my good girl,” said Mr. Kincaid, as he strolled into the room. “Shall I tell you about the ogress, the prince, and the pot of peas?”

“Peas!” echoed Nell.

“Very well.” Devon leaned over the sofa. “Since you said please.”

She chortled. “Peas!”

Nell held up her arms. Devon lifted the child. Mina took a bite of bread and jam. Nell shrieked indignantly.

Some few moments passed before order was restored, at which point jam adorned not only Mrs. Moxley’s nose and Mr. Kincaid’s shoulder but also the sofa and the oil painting — Bacchanalian children playing with apples and grapes, fruit and flowers and some drunken-looking bees — that hung on one striped wall.

Zoe wafted through the doorway, wearing a long-sleeved high-necked morning dress of white French lawn. “Good gracious, what a rumpus! Oh I see, it’s Nell. She is monstrous grubby. Is that jam
in her hair?” She beamed at Devon. “I am going to have an amour.”

“How nice for you,” responded Mr. Kincaid. Grace retreated further beneath the sofa. Nell thrust out her lower lip.

Zoe dimpled. “I haven’t decided with whom. It will not pose a difficulty, because I am a Loversall. Love is our obsession and our downfall. We gamble with our hearts as freely as others gamble with their money. Just one more romance, one more throw of the dice.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Mina. “I no longer gamble with my heart.”

Devon smiled at her. “One hopes you will relent, my pet.”

Mina regarded him with exasperation. “I am not your pet.”

He sat beside her on the sofa. “No, Nellie is my pet, aren’t you, poppet? Would you like to hear about the donkey cabbages?”

“Fustian, Cousin Wilhelmina!” Zoe had been watching this byplay. “How can you say you don’t gamble with your heart, after all those husbands you have had? But maybe it is for the best that you don’t do it any more, since they invariably seem to die.”

“‘
Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love’,”
quoth Devon.
“
As You Like It
, Act IV, Scene I.”

 “If you have not wished to die for love, it is because you have not met the right woman.” Demurely, Zoe lowered her lashes. “Or do not
realize
you have met her. I have noticed before that gentlemen frequently do not see what is right under their noses.”

 What was right under Devon’s nose was Zoe. Mina perfectly understood the Conte de Borghini’s willingness to wager his wife. “Considering the vast number of women Devon has tumbled, he may have good reason to be skeptical,” she remarked.

“Don’t fret, poppet,” Devon said to Nell, who had begun to fuss. “I don’t mind if the pretty lady insults me. We are old friends.” Zoe decided Mr. Kincaid’s eyesight must be deficient, because if anyone in the room should be called ‘pretty’, it was she. Mina rang for a footman, requested tea and a damp cloth and Meg.

Nell was squirming. Devon set her down. She made a bee-line for Grace’s twitching tail. The cat took refuge atop the writing desk — fitted with beaded drawers, tapering square legs, and a tooled leather writing surface upon which sat two silver candlesticks and an inkwell — that sat in a far corner. In her efforts to reach the cat, Nell overturned both the candlestick and the inkwell. Grace escaped to the opposite corner of the room, and clawed her way up the long case clock. There she settled, and refused to come down. Nell flung herself, shrieking on the floor. At this point, the footman returned, bringing with him tea, warm water, cloth and Meg, who wished nothing more than to return to her duties in the scullery and had additionally decided to forego offspring.

“Gracious!” exclaimed Zoe. “What an ill-behaved child.” The footman, she realized, was not unhandsome. She awarded him a smile.

Nell glimpsed Meg and shrieked louder. Meg held out a piece of toffee. Nell ceased screaming long enough to pop the candy into her mouth. While the child was preoccupied with chewing, Meg removed her from the room. The footman removed himself soon thereafter. Zoe followed. Mina sank back on the sofa with a heartfelt groan.

Devon sat down beside her. “You have the look of a slightly demented Madonna. It suits you.” Mina reflected upon the simple pleasure of being near an attractive rogue.

The rogue was considerably less dapper than when he first arrived. She dipped the washcloth in water, wrung it out, and dabbed at his sticky sleeve. “I fear this coat is ruined. You must send me your tailor bill.”

“Better I should send it to Abercorn.” Devon took the cloth and removed the jam from Mina’s nose. “Have you slept at all?”

“I have not, and thank you for remarking on it. Next you will tell me I am grown quite hagged.
You
would not sleep either, if you had Zoe and Nell—” Mina paused, struck by his expression. “Oh. I’ve kept you from your bed.”

Devon contemplated his bed, and his companion, and wondered if he would ever succeed in wedding the two. “I am unaccustomed to trysting at such an early hour. However, I am prepared to make an exception in your case.”

Mina, tired and jam-smeared and bedeviled, was in no mood for teasing. “Do be serious!” she snapped.

“Rather surprisingly, I
am
serious,” said Devon. “But since that is not the service you require of me, what may I do for you?”

Ah, what he might do for her. Mina wrenched her mind away from tangled sheets and sweat-dampened bodies and shuddering sighs. “I don’t know where to begin.”

Devon stretched out his long legs, noted the ink stain on one boot. “In my experience, which as you have observed is not inconsiderable, there are only two things that prompt a female to summon me at so ungodly an hour. You have ruled out assignation, have you not? Yes, I thought you had. Then I must conclude some new catastrophe has taken place.”

Mina hesitated. She knew what she must do, could think of nothing else
to
do, but was reluctant to say the words. “I had hoped to speak with you while Zoe was abed.”

“Am I to conclude that the new catastrophe involves Zoe?”

The new catastrophe
was
Zoe. Mina watched as Grace climbed down the clock, padded across the room, hopped gingerly onto the sofa and stretched out across Devon’s thighs. He threaded his fingers through her fur.

Things had come to a sorry pass, reflected Mina, when she was jealous of a cat. “I want you to engage Zoe.”

Devon raised an eyebrow. “By ‘engage’, I hope you don’t mean what I think you mean, because if you do mean it, the answer is a resounding no.”

Mina touched his arm. “Pray hear me out. Zoe needs to be taught a lesson — no, not
that
sort of lesson! — and at the same time you may prevent someone less principled from doing her real harm.”

Devon didn’t immediately answer, but regarded her with an unreadable expression. “What are you thinking?” Mina asked.

“I am deciding whether I should be insulted.”

“By my request that you distract my cousin?”

“By your suggestion that I have principles. What has inspired this bizarre request?”

Mina drew back her hand. “Zoe has set her sights on Quin.”