Blackstone's Bride (10 page)

Violet dipped her pen in ink and began by acknowledging the compliment of the duchess’s support for the project and begging her grace to understand that a grave family matter now prevented Violet from continuing to play a part in the plan. She went on to say she hoped the duchess would continue her support of the ball, but would understand if she did not.

She put her pen down. It was no good. Penelope must know by now that Violet had been shopping with Blackstone. Nothing about the scene that Lady Chalfont witnessed could be construed as an accidental encounter. Gentlemen did not frequent ladies’ hat shops. And once Penelope heard through whatever wagging tongue that Violet had engaged herself to Blackstone, any note, no matter how carefully worded, would appear false. Violet considered adding a postscript in which she disclaimed her interest in Blackstone.
I have no claim on Blackstone
.
He’s yours if you want him,
hardly struck a tone of modesty and civility
.
Instead she wrote that if rumors surfaced linking her with Blackstone, Penelope should ignore them. Violet’s intentions with regard to the man had not changed.

Chapter Ten

They were confined for the evening at different tables, and she had nothing to hope, but that his eyes were so often turned towards her side of the room, as to make him play as unsuccessfully as herself.

—Jane Austen,
Pride and Prejudice

Blackstone entered the long narrow stateroom on the ground floor of Hammersley House, familiar to him because he and Frank used to pass through it on their way to George Hammersley’s gunroom. The stateroom had an unexpected simplicity that was always a relief after the assault of the grand staircase. Though guests now filled the room, Violet, at the far end of the room, the prince’s arm in hers, was impossible to miss.

He had not seen Violet for nearly eleven hours. He should not be counting the hours apart from her, but though her father was aware of the danger, George had never had any power to stop Violet from acting on her own. Blackstone did not know whether she had seen Goldsworthy’s announcement in the paper.

He approached through the crowd, conscious of how few faces he recognized. As the daughter of a self-made man, albeit a wealthy banker, Violet moved in different circles from the titled circle in which he moved, where birth established one’s position and relation to a familiar set of people. One knew their faces and places in the same way one knew one’s sums. The mood of the evening gathering and the absence of feathered headdresses struck him at once. Guests engaged in earnest conversation, rather than flirtation, and made polite way for him without any hint of recognition. There would be none of Lady Ravenhurst’s cronies in the crowd. He could play the role of besotted fiancé without rousing any gossip.

The snatches of talk he overheard as he angled his way to Violet’s side reminded him further of past visits he’d made with Frank. Conversation in Hammersley House inevitably revolved around London. It was no different now, he found, than it had been when he first began joining the Hammersleys for visits between terms at Cambridge. He saw Sir Xander Jones again, and exchanged a nod with him. Jones, a few years Blackstone’s senior, was changing London with gas lighting. At Jones’s side a trim matron in green spoke of necessary bank reforms, and a tall thin young man with a head of thick brown curls openly advocated the merits of cundums to an older gentleman. By the time Blackstone reached his false fiancé, he could almost believe he’d stepped back into his own past.

A shocked look flickered briefly in Violet’s dark eyes as she caught sight of him, as if she could not comprehend his being there at all. He could read that passing look because he knew the same jolt at seeing her. If he had died and begun haunting her, she would have looked at him that way. Dressed in silk the color of ripening berries, her skin glowed like pearls. Her black hair was done up in soft ringlets that framed her face. He was coming to know the current fashion of ladies’ gowns, cut to show the slope of a woman’s shoulders and the narrow span of her waist.

As he took his place beside her, she offered him a private glare of renewed hostilities. “You had no right to keep me confined this afternoon. I am no longer a green girl.”

He lifted her palm to his lips and drew her close, inhaling a light floral scent. “Your father kept you confined.”

“You scared him into it.”

He leaned over, claiming a fiancé’s privilege, to speak in her ear. Her posture had stiffened in his absence. There was a cold aloofness in her bearing that he did not remember. “Recall that someone put a thorn under Oberon’s saddle this morning with intent to kill.”

“I could have searched the royal guest rooms while they were out with my father.”

“Their rooms have been searched.”

She turned towards him, and her curls brushed his cheek. “By whom?”

He found it necessary to pull back, dizzied by the scent of her. “The two new members of your staff who received training from your housekeeper today. A sensible woman, your Mrs. Clark.”

“What did they find?”

“Nothing that helps us.”

She searched his face. “Nothing you’re telling me.”

“I do have something for you later.”

“What?”

“Meet me in Frank’s room at the end of the evening.” He watched the little struggle on her face between outrage at his tone of command and her inevitable practicality.

“I’ve been thinking about the thorn under Oberon’s saddle. It isn’t an English thorn, is it?”

“We’ll talk tonight.”

Another guest claimed them, and for half an hour, they played at being betrothed, with the prince never failing to mention their engagement, Dubusari looking on with cordial politeness, and George Hammersley frozen in stiff formality. They accepted the surprise and the warmth of her friends, most of whom seemed not to know their history.

When a question about the dinner claimed Violet’s attention, Blackstone moved away from close proximity to white arms and maddening womanly warmth and found himself the object of a furious stare from a young man with a head of close-cropped fawn-colored curls and a clerical collar that appeared to choke him. The collar and his rigid wide-legged stance set him awkwardly apart from the conversational knots about the room. He appeared to be maintaining his balance on a rolling ship’s deck. He had youthful, softly handsome features, at odds with the cold disdain in his earnest gray eyes. He appeared offended, as if he’d encountered a scene of outright debauchery.

“Have we met? I’m Blackstone.”

“Never. Arthur Rushbrooke, a friend to Miss Hammersley.”

Blackstone lifted his wineglass to her friend. “How are you acquainted with her?”

“We share an interest in charitable works.”

“Violet is active in charity, isn’t she?”

“Miss Hammersley is a most remarkable woman, tireless in doing good for the poor. It would be a great loss to London if anything turned her from her devotion to good works.”

Blackstone did not pretend to miss the man’s meaning. “Such as a disreputable husband, perhaps.”

Rushbrooke’s chest puffed out. “I know I am beneath you in rank, my lord, but I count myself gentleman enough to defend Miss Hammersley’s good name.”

“Which is hardly in danger from an honorable engagement.”

“A man who returns to England with a harem . . .”

“Is unworthy of Miss Hammersley, to be sure, but then few men are truly worthy of the women to whom they aspire. I promise that when we’re married I’ll keep her in bed no more than eight in twenty-four hours of the day. She should then have sufficient time to continue her charitable work.”

Blackstone saluted the gaping reverend and stepped into the courtyard where the dinner was to be served. Violet’s staff moved about, laying out supper dishes and lighting candles on little tables. He drank his wine, finding himself unreasonably annoyed by Rushbrooke. He should not be. The man was a stranger to him and a prig. His judgment, while common and unthinking, was ignorant.
A harem
,
where had that one come from?

He remembered a verse that had circulated about him during the worst of the scandal after his father died. His mother had begged him to buy up all the copies, but he had refused. It had been a page-long ditty about the trusty yard of young Lord Bl__kst_ne. He had not forgotten the damned refrain.

Lord Bl__kst_ne’s yard it measures true

When ladies’ locks love does bedew.

Thus London’s ladies to him flock

To have their measure taken,

Lest by love they be forsaken.

Hazelwood’s theory that Goldsworthy picked his spies for their notoriety made sense. Blackstone and his fellow spies could move in fashionable society, and society would see only the fallen hero, the wastrel, and the rakeshame. No one would guess that each had quite a different role to play in the game. Still he needed to talk with someone of sense. He put his wineglass on the tray of a passing footman and reentered the fray.

* * *

Violet’s face hurt from smiling. She had been giving supper parties for three years and had never felt any strain in being a hostess till now. The informality of a supper party suited Hammersley House and her father’s style of playing host. Mrs. Hill, Violet’s cook, was adept at cheese puff pastries, tiny iced cakes, and all the delicacies in between. Her usual guests seemed to quite enjoy the greater freedom of sitting at supper tables in the open courtyard rather than enduring the formality of an endless dinner in the dining room. Tonight her guests were people from what Violet liked to call the sensible world rather than the fashionable world. Most of the gentlemen knew her father through his bank or his philanthropy. They were Londoners. They did not have vast country estates and three-hundred-year-old titles. They had businesses and political positions. Only Blackstone so obviously came from that other world. Everything about him proclaimed it. She had introduced him repeatedly to people, watching for the signs that they knew the scandal, knew the past connection between Violet and Blackstone.

At the time of those public revelations, she could not leave the house without feeling herself to be the object of curious, prying stares. It might not have been so, but she felt it nonetheless.

Violet recalled her unsent message to the duchess. She must finish it in the morning. She had believed that asking Blackstone to postpone the customary public announcement would give them time to find Frank and dissolve their engagement before the thing was widely known.

Now she could see that news of it would inevitably get abroad, and it would not do to have Penelope hear indirectly that Violet was engaged to Blackstone. There was little danger from her current guests of any gossip reaching past Violet’s friends, but as she and Blackstone ventured beyond Hammersley House together, they were bound to stir more talk. Lady Chalfont’s first report of seeing them together would find confirmation and spur speculation. And in London, speculation had a way of being taken for truth.

Blackstone hardly seemed aware of her as he mingled with her guests, so much for the appearance of a betrothal. At least the little countess had sought other admirers, while Violet had Mr. Rushbrooke. He’d come to her side when Blackstone disappeared. She could not remember a time when she had enjoyed Rushbrooke’s company less. He frowned at everything she said and offered corrections to her most commonplace observances. Abruptly he appealed to her to explain her beekeeping project to Mrs. Pogue, and she realized she had not been attending to him. The project was dear to her heart, but as she tried to explain why it seemed so promising, she found her account of it sounded dull to her own ears. Mrs. Pogue’s eyes looked positively fixed like the eyes in a portrait.

A laugh distracted her. It was Blackstone’s laugh, a low, male sound, full of easy confidence, recognizable at once to her ears. She felt the vibration of it in her stomach, a low rumble that caused a swooping dip inside her. She turned away from Mr. Rushbrooke just as he was explaining that
Bombus pascuorum
was the common bumblebee. He was fond of offering a bit of Latin, capping Violet’s knowledge with his own erudition.

Blackstone was speaking with Lady Jones, a matron with three young children and a fiercely devoted husband. It was she who had made him laugh, and he made her laugh in turn. The intimate sound of their shared amusement made Violet feel that an abyss separated her from Blackstone instead of a few yards of carpet. From across the room Sir Alexander Jones heard the laugh and unerringly turned a proprietary glance at his wife. What had Violet’s aborted note to the countess said?
There is a coolness between us, which cannot be overcome, in spite of public appearances to the contrary.

She pulled her gaze away, and found that the company in the room had thinned. The prince was nowhere in sight, and the number of gentlemen had diminished. She had not yet given the signal to move to the courtyard for a light supper. The absence of so many guests puzzled her.

Mr. Rushbrooke spoke in her ear. “The gentlemen have gone to look at your father’s gunroom.”

“Thank you, Mr. Rushbrooke. Pardon me, I will see if I can move them towards the supper.”

Her father, an avid duck hunter, had built Hammersley House near the last good duck hunting to be had in London. His gun collection lined the room’s walnut-paneled walls, and it was not unusual for him to lure his male guests away from mixed company to see his prized possessions. In the doorway Violet smiled. It was just as she suspected. Papa had gathered a small group of gentlemen around an open case on the large worktable where he cleaned his guns. As she entered the room, he lifted one of his flintlock pistols from its velvet bed and placed it in the prince’s open hands, commenting on the gun’s features.

“You see, Prince,” her father explained, “a properly tuned flintlock, with a good frizzen that sparks regularly, and a priming pan polished to a mirror finish, will fire every time.”

The prince shifted his hold on the pistol, half cocking the hammer, not sighting, just pointing the gun idly down the room as five gentlemen watched. Papa’s hand stretched out to push the barrel down when a rough hand snagged Violet and spun her into a close embrace. At the same time the gun discharged with an ear-splitting crack. Wood paneling to Violet’s left exploded in splinters. Her ears rang. The smell of burned powder and grease stung her nose. In the next instant she became conscious of Blackstone’s iron embrace, her face pressed to his linen, his chin resting on the top of her head.

Ordinary sensation stopped, as if time had taken a deep inhale, and waited to expel its next breath. Violet had a fleeting desire to stay closed in the suspended moment. Then the room erupted in male outrage.

“Damn! It was loaded.” She recognized the prince’s startled voice and the clatter of a pistol hitting the table in the jumble of noise that broke over her. Violet’s eyes closed. Her body spasmed briefly against Blackstone’s before she got control.

“Violet!”

Blackstone released her. She turned and Papa rushed forward, looking ashen. She moved to him and squeezed his hand. “No harm done, Papa, except to your wall.”

The prince charged forward. “Miss Hammersley, a thousand apologies. Unforgivable of me. I never guessed. I am devastated. Please don’t faint, dear lady.”