Blackstone's Bride (5 page)

“Lord Blackstone, you must tell me”—the countess glanced at her husband, who appeared to be dozing with a wineglass dangling from his slack hand—“how to behave here in England. I do not want to make any faux pas.
May I rely on you?”

Her eyes were full of helpless appeal. She reached out a small hand to touch his. Blackstone felt General Dubusari’s scrutiny and smiled at the little countess. Maybe Hazelwood had it right after all. Young Wilde was Hermes disguised by impeccable English tailoring to lead Goldsworthy’s reluctant spies down to that special rung of Hades where the things a man wanted hovered out of reach while some lesser object dangled near at hand.

Chapter Five

. . . when occasionally, unable to resist the impulse of curiosity, she raised her eyes to his face, she as often found him looking at . . . no object but the ground.

—Jane Austen,
Pride and Prejudice

Violet entered Frank’s room on shaking legs. She needed to be doing something, anything to recover him.
Frank. Missing
. The two words beat in her head every minute making sleep impossible.

The quiet when the neighborhood bells sounded was hollow and mournful. Violet had settled her guests and their servants for the night, the countess’s thin stick of a lady’s maid, the prince’s diminutive valet, and his hulking bodyguard, who was to sleep in his dressing room. There was also a rotund little chef, who insisted on inspecting and tasting all of the dishes offered to the prince by Violet’s offended cook. Once she’d seen her guests off to bed, Blackstone had gone. Her mind had instantly cleared without the simmering distraction of his presence. Near him she felt like a little pot on a flame, bubbling and seething. She had reported to Papa on the prince’s arrival and made him take a sleeping draught. Promising to do the same, she dismissed her maid.

She closed Frank’s door. It was odd to enter with no expectation of seeing him. When he was not on one of his trips, she often stopped by to visit with him before each of them left for separate evening entertainments. He had talked of taking bachelor’s quarters, but hadn’t got round to it.

To her right beyond the faint glow of her candle loomed the dark mass of his tester bed with its carved paneled headboard and gold tapestried hangings. The walls of the room were a deep burgundy. Frank’s green trunk stood upended and open in the center of the room where Blackstone had asked Preston to leave it. She was sure Blackstone meant to examine it again himself, and she wanted to be ahead of him.

She set her candle on top of the upended trunk and studied the open wings of the interior. If Frank had anticipated danger, he would have left a sign in the arrangement of the drawers. Since he had begun traveling for the bank, he used the pattern of the silk print as a kind of index, and by shifting the drawers, he could arrange the slanting lines in several ways to leave a message for Preston or for Violet herself.

Staring into the trunk released thoughts Blackstone’s presence had driven from her head. It was a double mystery, both Frank’s disappearance and the government’s investigation. She wanted to understand both, but the questions and possibilities made her chest feel too tight for her heart, and her legs were really behaving quite badly. She dragged the leather bench from the foot of Frank’s bed to face the trunk and sat, folding her hands in her lap, conscious of the absurd chunk of glass on her left hand. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Frank was alive somewhere, and they would get him back. No other thought would do. As the government’s man, Blackstone’s concern would be the missing report. Well, he could find it himself. She would worry about Frank. She opened her eyes and set to thinking.

During the interminable supper and the coffee that followed, she had studied the prince’s people. The prince himself seemed a brainless mix of flattery and anticipation for the wonders of London. She could get little out of him about Frank. Each time she so much as alluded to her brother, the prince stopped to pat her hand consolingly. When he leaned towards her, she smelled the cloying floral pomade of his moustache. She had quickly realized she could not endure those sympathetic pats, and she could not say more without giving away her knowledge of the true circumstances of Frank’s absence.

It was the others in the party who made her uneasy. They were half a second too late to laugh at the prince’s jokes and entirely too watchful for guests consuming the amount of wine the count insisted on pouring. She had hoped for better luck questioning the countess, when the two of them retired to the drawing room while the men lingered over port at the table, but she learned little. The Countess Rezina had a fair, childlike beauty with long corkscrews of flaxen curls and an old-fashioned high-waisted gown with a gold sash and loops of heavy matching cord along the hem. She and the prince both had a painted look of doll-bright cheeks and eyes, and she seemed more like a daughter to her husband the count, than a wife.

When Violet asked how they came to be traveling with the prince, the countess reminded Violet that Prince Andre, one of a confusing number of claimants to the Moldovan throne, had come into his position as a result of a Russo-Turkish agreement. The prince, caught between the two enemies, had turned immediately to England, as to a friend, for military aid.

The countess, a cousin of Andre’s, was helping the bachelor prince to establish his court. She explained that she had been raised in a dreadful moldy old pile of a castle surrounded by a swamp. She confessed that she found her new position daunting and that she hoped to see how the great hostesses of London managed their affairs. She was sure everyone in Moldova would judge her cruelly. She had heard, but couldn’t quite believe, that ladies in London sometimes dampened their petticoats. Her pale blue eyes big with wonder, she assured Violet that such a daring practice would result in pneumonia in her country. Violet doubted the woman was as naïve as she appeared.

The only information the countess offered about Frank was a remark that he had gone to pay a call on their last day in Spain, and they had not seen him again. “In truth,” the countess confided, “I think he went to see a certain sort of woman. I heard him inquire of one of the porters the way to the Romany district.”

This breathless confidence seemed implausible. Frank was no libertine, and he had no personal connections in Spain that Violet knew. To suggest that Frank had wandered into danger somewhere away from the prince’s people absolved the royal party of responsibility. The prince and the countess hinted that Frank had disappeared or been delayed in Spain, but the government believed him to be in England. Violet might have believed the prince, if she had not read the note. The note that Frank had penned but not composed was the most alarming piece of the puzzle. In Violet’s mind the note ruled out the possibility of kidnapping. If strangers had kidnapped Frank, his captors would make a ransom demand of their banker father.

Her legs grew steadier, and Violet pushed the bench back. Kneeling, she rearranged the drawers of Frank’s trunk according to his usual habit, but the pattern swam before her eyes. She would need more light to see any message he intended. She glanced over her shoulder at the mantelpiece, looking for candles, and found none. For a moment she simply regarded the empty mantelpiece, where Frank’s familiar possessions—his bronze clock, his red and black Greek vase, his onyx owls—all seemed to be in their proper places. Her brain stalled trying to recall where she had moved the candlesticks. They had not taken themselves off to other shelves. She was contemplating the mystery when a slight noise drew her gaze to Frank’s bed.

A gasp escaped her, and her hand flew up as if she could catch the small sound. Blackstone stood looking at her, from the shadows, a dark figure, except for the white silk of his waistcoat and cuffs. He stood as still as one of Frank’s bedposts, but from deep inside her, memory leapt up to meet him, foolishly glad at his presence. Her knees buckled, and she sat down hard on the bench, her heart racing.

“How like us, Violet, to end up alone together at night.”

As he came towards her, carrying the missing branch of candles, forgotten lessons from their time together surfaced. She knew the way he moved, even the way he came to a stop, and how it would feel to press her hand to his taut belly to hold him back, not that she had ever held him back for long. She knew he could lie at his ease, his limbs warm and sprawled as if in sleep and spring in a flash to catch her and pin her under him.

Us.
Her poor heart beat overfast in her tight chest, making speech impossible. He stopped beside the trunk and dipped his branch of candles to light them from hers. “You want another look at Frank’s trunk.”

She found her voice. “And so do you.” Her one thought was that they must not touch. That was all. No matter how many times in the past they had been mad to touch, if they did not touch now, Violet could manage the conversation. She would concentrate on Frank and get Blackstone to tell her what he knew.

He set his candles on the open trunk and took a place beside her on the bench, studying the trunk as she had done. “What do you think we overlooked earlier?”

We
. Again he made a careless assumption of their being joined somehow, working together, having a common goal, which they did not. “I thought you’d gone.”

“Leaving you to the potential murderers and the royal flatterer?”

She fixed her gaze on Frank’s trunk. “There must be something. There was too little time earlier.”

“I think we need more light.” For a few minutes he moved about, collecting candlesticks and lamps and setting up a bright circle of illumination around them. Sitting down beside her again, he was so close she could smell the scent of his shaving soap, a fresh, clean scent that reminded her of the moment of breaking the skin of an orange. His shoulder was inches from hers. His long legs stretched out towards Frank’s trunk.

“Where have you been?” She clasped her hands in her lap and twisted the ring on her finger. Her hands had done no wicked thing in five years, and now she wanted to touch him.

“Did you wonder?”

“I never thought of you.”

“Liar. You were angry for months. You invented a thousand set-downs to give me. You burned all your keepsakes.”

“I had none.”

Undeterred by her denial, he went on. “You turned to your estimable friend Augusta Lowndes, who abused me thoroughly and told you that you were lucky to be rid of me and all such titled blackguards.”

Violet glanced at his profile. His lids veiled his eyes. His dark hair fell slightly unruly over his collar.

He had exactly described her efforts to forget him. Except for the part where she berated herself and called herself an idiot a hundred times a day, and the part where she curled in a ball under piles of covers to muffle her sobs. After weeks Augusta had dragged her out of her fetid bed, combed the hopeless tangles from her hair, and set her on her feet again.

In the beginning, every step forward had felt as if she plowed into a gale, a howling wind of loss and humiliation and self-loathing. She’d kept at it, kept her head bent down pushing forward, kept herself endlessly occupied, turned her thoughts away from him, and now when she’d made such progress in forgetting, he had returned to say
us
and
we
and take away all the ground she’d gained. Well, she would not let him know he had cost her an ounce of effort.

She stood, pulling her shawl about her and moving to stand beyond the circle of light next to Frank’s writing table. “Augusta suggested that I’d had a narrow escape and should count my blessings.”

“I knew you could rely on her.” He seemed to be regarding his black evening pumps with undivided attention.

“Ridiculous to have been so young,” she told Frank’s writing table.

“Unavoidable, however. So what have you been doing with yourself since those black days?”

Violet moved from the little table to the cold hearth. “Me? I am a formidable philanthropist. There is hardly a need for succor among the destitute of our great city to which I have not responded. I founded sewing schools for women where the silk trade declined and provided boats for fishermen. I promoted housing schemes for workers pouring into London and removed pauper boys from the prisons and workhouses to train for the merchant service. I am president of the British Beekeepers Association, as you shall see, because the prince is interested in my bee work.”

Her catalogue of good works sounded paltry. What did it matter all the good she’d done, if he could come back and make her clasp her hands together to keep from touching him. What did it matter who she’d tried to save in London, if she had not saved herself. She wished she could say—
I fell in love and married
—that would have been an answer, but she could not claim such a complete recovery from their early attachment. She repositioned the pair of stone owls on the marble mantelpiece next to Frank’s black and red Greek urn. Her hand lingered on the urn in which Frank collected pennies. He picked them up wherever he went, working girls, he called them. Blackstone’s voice recalled her to the present.

“You’ve employed the time better than I have.”

She turned to study his back. He was hardly being forthcoming. “You didn’t answer my question about where you have been.”

“Most recently? In Greece.”

“Like Byron? Did you go to help them win their independence?”

“Most assuredly not; a fool’s errand, that.”

“You were ill there.” She noticed again how thin he was, gaunt even, and how his skin had a look of parchment under a fading tan.

“No more than the ordinary complaints of travelers. It’s a rough country. Bandits and warlords have more sway than any government.”

“Have you been home yet?”

At the word
home
he stiffened almost imperceptibly. “No.”

She blinked at the abruptness with which he closed the topic. “You’ve made yourself known in London.”

“No more than before.”

She thought she had achieved a nice symmetry with the owls, the urn, and Frank’s bronze clock. “What induced you to work for the government?”

“I have some expertise they need, and the work is hardly facing cannon.”

She returned to the bench, giving in to the pull of his presence. It was idiotic, but she still felt it, as if she’d waded into a swift stream whose current threatened her balance, dragging her inevitably towards him. “I should think you’d prefer the cannon.”

“You would, I’m sure. What story shall we tell the world?” He reached over and stilled her fingers where she twisted the ring he’d given her. “We’ll never convince the prince and his lot that we are betrothed if you twist my ring off your finger.”