Blackstone's Bride (20 page)

Frank heard Sackett mutter to himself. Then he shouted, “You’d best not be where oy kin find ya, Frank ’ammersley.” Abruptly, Sackett stopped. Frank heard him muttering again. The light sent a faint steady beam along the floor. Frank listened. Sackett appeared to be relieving himself.

He shrugged out of his coat, waistcoat, and shirt, sweating madly. He put the waistcoat and coat back on and wrapped his once white shirt around a sack lying on the lift. Sackett’s light showed him the pulley. He released it, and the rough rope slid hotly through his hand. The platform creaked and rattled and began to descend. He braced himself to slow its momentum.

Sackett hollered, and Frank could hear him start to run, and stop and curse. Frank kept feeding the pulley, letting the lift rattle downward. As Sackett neared, Frank staggered back into the shadows. The lift was free-falling now. Sackett burst through the door as the thing hit bottom. Sackett leaned over the ledge, holding his lamp up.

“The idiot’s kilt ’imself, ’e ’as,” he muttered.

Behind him, Frank slipped back through the arch, sliding along the wall until he could drop and drag himself behind a pile of twisted metal and charred wood. He rubbed his face with black ash and lay still, his injured leg throbbing. He would not be dancing soon.

Chapter Eighteen

. . . she had been blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd.

—Jane Austen,
Pride and Prejudice

Violet stood with her fellow patronesses in the ball’s receiving line, Penelope at the head, Violet at the end of the line, reaping the rewards of their bargain. Much of fashionable London appeared determined to squeeze through a narrow plain wainscoted foyer into the glittering hall.

The prince’s party arrived early in splendid military fashion. The prince exclaimed over the excess of beauty and declared himself pledged to dance with all the women present if it was permitted. Papa made a fine figure, and the patroness next to Violet whispered to her how very much the gentleman her father seemed to be, as if the notion were a wonder.

The seamstresses’ gowns drew exactly the sort of notice Violet had hoped. Every lady, even the little countess, took note, though for all her professed interest in fashion, she wore one of her fragile gowns with three elaborate rows of heavy gold velvet cord around the hem.

Penelope repeatedly presented Violet as the Hammersley Heiress, as if she were a curiosity, like a new monument open to public view. She received the acknowledgements of several young men whose smiles widened and bows deepened at the word
heiress
.

One of them lingered over her hand beyond politeness. “I beg your pardon, Miss . . . ?”

“Hammersley,” she repeated. He appeared ready to make a note of it if only he had a notebook in his pocket.

Her helpful neighbor in line whispered, “Younger son, not a groat to his name.”

In spite of the happy crush that proclaimed the ball a success, Violet was conscious of an unreasonable knot in her stomach. She told herself that nothing could mar the evening. The room was well proportioned and fitted up with pots of daffodils and hyacinths in mossy banks. The musicians were of the first quality and knew the popular quadrilles and waltzes. Violet’s own cook had pronounced the lemon cakes edible, and no one could object to ratafia and champagne. If the food was not of some rare, ambrosial quality, the number of candles gave the scene the sort of warmth and glow of any large space adequately illuminated. The ball might not be out of the common way, but it would not disgrace them.

As the room filled, it became plain that Penelope waited for Blackstone as consciously as Violet did. To Penelope he was a free man, a man of interest. His reputation made him so; a man who belonged to no woman seemed the property of all women. Penelope saw him as the man in the portrait. She would never lose her heart to him. To Violet all that mattered was the plan they had made to distract Frank’s kidnappers by removing the prince from their midst. She would have to converse with Blackstone to put that plan in motion, but of course, she did not have to dance with him.

As the ballroom filled, the receiving line dwindled, and Blackstone did not come. Violet understood him. He wished to avoid her as much as she wished to avoid him. In the narrow confines of Hammersley House, where they had met and loved, he might not be able to resist her, but in his world he would have as little to do with her as possible.

Penelope shrugged and signaled Violet to assemble her particular guests. The ball was to begin with a brief ceremony, recognizing the women who had made the silk that each of the patronesses wore. Violet ushered them to the dais in front of the orchestra. It was what she’d wished for, a fortnight earlier, a chance to reach fashionable London and touch the hearts of people whose pocketbooks provided work for thousands. The women looked elegant, and the gowns were splendid. She should be very happy with the success of her first ball.

* * *

On his way to Violet’s ball, Blackstone stopped by the club’s card room where Hazelwood and Clare both appeared to be losing, a growing pile of chips rising on the green baize table between them. He couldn’t find Wilde, and he had no time to track the youth down at Miranda Kirby’s side.

The plan was clear in Blackstone’s head. He had conferred with Captain Rodriguez, and a small encampment for the prince had been added to the captain’s bivouac in Regent’s Park. The last detail in Blackstone’s mind was Wilde. He wanted the youth to spend the night on guard outside the prince’s tent as an added precaution.

“Blackstone, don’t you have all the luck! I suppose you are off to grace a ballroom and later a bedroom?” Hazelwood laid down an impressive run of royal faces.

“Have you seen Wilde?” he asked.

Hazelwood and Clare exchanged sober glances. “He didn’t return. Miranda came looking for him.”

Blackstone stopped midstride. Wilde was used to operating in the darkest streets of London. He was canny and clever and he knew the danger of the work. “No word?”

“None.”

“Have a care, Blackstone, Goldsworthy sees all, you know.”

“Do you want us to do something?” Clare asked.

“Pray.”

* * *

The young man who’d made a note of Violet’s name and fortune claimed her for one of the early country dances. As they made their way down the set, she caught sight of Blackstone in a knot of persons accepting flutes of champagne from a passing servant. Her heart briefly changed its beat, and she lost her connection to the music and had to apologize to her partner for a missed step. She saw that Blackstone was known, more even than he had been at the theater, where his friends had come to their box. Here, every glance seemed to recognize him. Men greeted him easily, and women took his measure, not as a man of title and fortune, but as a man. That other assessment of his person, subtle or open, flickered through glances as he passed. Whispers rustled in his wake.

Penelope came to her then. “He’s here.” She put a gloved hand to her mouth to cover a quick giddy laugh. “Causing talk and speculation, as always.” She sobered briefly, tamping down the excitement in her green eyes. “Violet, I meant what I said to you that day. I will give him the cut direct if you want him still.”

“Dance with him, of course, Penelope. He is not my Blackstone.”

Violet knew what he was about. He had made some bargain with the government to find Frank. He had used her to make sense of the clues to her brother’s whereabouts, but he had made no pretense of loving her this time. If they had given in to old desires, she would overcome those feelings this time as she had before.

She should forgive him and let him go. After all, forgiveness was a gift one gave oneself in the giving. It was like opening the cage of one’s heart and letting the miserable huddled creatures, the hopes inside, fly free.

She found herself with a run of partners and very little ability to attend to them. The room had a great many couples now, but she saw only Blackstone dancing with her fellow patronesses, with the countess, with a shy young woman, whom Violet had not noticed earlier, and twice with Penelope.

Blackstone looked over his partner’s topaz headdress at the crowd. He did not intend to dance with Violet Hammersley. Let the gossips make of it what they would. Let the Moldovans suspect whatever they might suspect. The prince was in sight, dancing vigorously and pouring his heavy-handed flattery over anything in skirts. Within hours the empty-headed monarch would be surrounded by Rodriguez’s men, and in the morning, they would whisk him away to even greater safety in a country house prepared for him by the government.

Still Wilde’s failure to report had Blackstone on edge. He had sent Wilde alone this time to keep Goldsworthy from getting to Frank first. If Frank was the thief and murderer that Goldsworthy and the government suspected him of being and Goldsworthy found him first, Blackstone would lose everything. If Frank was honest, but his keepers recognized Wilde as a government man, both Frank and Wilde were at risk.

Between sets Blackstone’s friend Slindon appeared at his side with a glass in hand. “Blackstone, what are you doing here, man?” Slindon knocked back his drink. “Tame stuff, don’t you think? Wouldn’t have come except that Fothergill has a wager going on some sort of intrigue. I say, if you see him, tell him I’m off to Madame Latova’s. You should come. It’s just your sort of thing.”

Blackstone raised his glass and bid his friend good night. Violet was at the other end of the dance. He could see her out of the corner of his eye, and across the room he could see the countess. More than once she had cast him one of her helpless appeals. She was oddly dressed, even for her usual taste, with bands of gold cord around the hem of her white gown. Plainly her husband did not dance, and Dubusari sat with the chaperones, apparently charming them with his quaint eloquence.

As the dancers moved through the figures, Violet advanced nearer. She had chosen to wear something made of petals, or so it seemed to Blackstone, the fabric soft and of a pale dawn pink that gave her skin a pearl-like luster. The cut of the gown fit around her narrow ribs where his hand would go if he danced with her. He laughed at himself. So much for thinking he could refuse to dance with her. He and Violet might think that they had ended it again with his admission that the government was investigating Frank and her confession of her visit to Royce’s studio, but whatever had started between them all those years ago was not so easily overcome.

As she passed him, the dance brought her round so that they were briefly face-to-face. He let her know that he would be coming for her.

At the end of the set he started in her direction when he felt a hand on his sleeve. He turned and found the countess looking up at him with a trembling lip.

* * *

He almost left it too late. Violet had seen the promise in his eyes, and then he had gone aside with the countess. He did not come for Violet until the musicians began the last waltz. She told herself it would be a farewell dance, a fitting parting, light and airy as music. It would look odd for them not to converse. They would exchange banalities suitable for the breathless whirl of the dance. There would be no pain that she had not already endured and overcome. This week of wearing his paste ring had been about Frank.

He held out his gloved hand, and she placed her hand in his, lightly, and still the shock of his touch passed through her to her toes.

“I’ve danced with every woman, from seventeen to forty-seven, who could possibly have a claim on my courtesy, Violet. Now it’s time for us.” He pulled her out into a waltz and turned her to face him, their hands extended for the opening moves.

She stared at the very fine onyx stickpin in his cravat. “It’s good to know my place in the queue.”

He laughed as his arm went round her and his hand took possession of the base of her spine, that place from which he would command her movements. Their hands lifted and pressed against each other, his left to her right.

“You don’t understand anything.” His brows contracted in a frown, his mouth grim.

She lifted her chin, and held her head high. She thought it a cruel thing to say, the first cruel thing Blackstone had ever said to her. The first steps were a gliding promenade while Violet held herself proudly aloof, their position open, their arms looped around each other’s back, then the music changed. The hand at the small of her back drew her closer, arching her spine, lifting her into his hold. She turned her head to look over his shoulder. But there was no escape. His breath stirred against her ear.

“There’s really no place to go, Violet,” he said. With a shove of his left hand he pushed her back, snapped her into his embrace, and whirled them into the dance.

Blackstone knew she would deny their connection with her last breath if he let her, but her body would not lie. He linked them with his hold so that they turned and whirled and dipped in the sensuous figures as one, and she must look up into his eyes and cling to his hand.

Her scent, sweet and delicate as a single flower opening, filled his head. He could look down into eyes as dark as night and skin as smooth and soft as sea foam. The heat and the motion freed strands of her midnight hair to curl softly around her face.

Violet tried to concentrate on something, anything, that would take her mind off Blackstone’s hold, the way his hand moved her effortlessly across the floor. The crisp scent of him enveloped her. Through their gloves she felt the hard edge of the Blackstone ring. She tried to summon the pain of that moment when her young heart had broken, but the pain didn’t come.

It felt right dancing with him. They moved well together, their bodies anticipating each other. He raised their joined arms and sent her spinning so that when she came back to his hold, breathless and giddy with the dance, her eyes met his. There were friendly lines around his smile. There was laughter in those deep blue eyes of his, a laughter she had missed, the way dwellers in polar lands must miss the sun in their long winters, and it made her remember another time.

They had been kissing wildly in the long gallery, and he’d spun her in a circle. “Lord, I love you, Violet,” he had said. “When you are old enough, you must marry me.”

She had stopped their spin. “I am old enough. I am nineteen, and I know my mind. I will marry you, Lyle.” She had called him Lyle then before he became Blackstone. “But I won’t marry you without knowing.”

He’d cast her a suspicious look. “Knowing what?”

She’d drawn a breath and held herself very still so that he would understand she was quite serious. Once before she had told him her position, and she didn’t want him to think she jested. “Without knowing what it will be like between us in the marriage bed.”

He’d nearly choked. “Violet, you don’t need further proof. It will be passionate . . .”

She pressed her hand to his mouth to still him. “But it will be unequal because you know more than I do.”

He, too, had grown serious. “While I’m flattered that you think me a man of wide experience, you keep me too busy for any further instruction. So you’ll soon catch up with me, once we begin.”

Violet had grinned at him then and asked, “So, when do we begin?”

It had not been that day, but they had begun not long after, and he had insisted that she agree to marry him.

The music changed again, signaling a passage in which the dancers circled the room facing forward. Violet felt the stares, the knowing looks. Everyone thought her a great fool. Now she knew why. She, too, had seen the painting of his beautiful Spanish mistress, arching up under her lover’s touch. She held her head erect and gripped his hand for steadiness, feeling the hard band of the infamous Blackstone ring on his left hand.