How to Romance a Rake (12 page)

“She dislikes him,” Madeline continued conversationally, “Turlington, that is. If you are worried at all about his having a prior claim or some nonsense like that.”

“Are you always this forthright, my lady?” he asked, torn between shock at the blonde’s frankness and admiration for her boldness. “I admit that I doubted there could be another young lady as demanding as your cousin, the Duchess of Winterson, but I find I was mistaken.”

She smiled, the expression transforming her from merely pretty to lovely. “Cecily possesses enough brass for the three of us,” she said, grinning. “But yes, I do find that more often than not a bit of plain speaking saves misunderstandings. Don’t you?”

While he agreed to the concept, he couldn’t help but imagine how different the world might be if everyone were given to that kind of plain speaking. The mind boggled.

“At times,” he said cautiously, wondering whether agreeing with the chit would lead her into more dangerous waters. “However, I do wonder if your cousin, Juliet I mean, would like knowing you were speaking about such a private matter while she isn’t here.”

“Well, you can hardly expect me to ask you if you’re in love with her while she’s sitting here with us. For one thing, it would cause her to inflict some sort of bodily harm upon my person. And I’m not at all fond of such things. For another, I can hardly expect you to give me a truthful answer when the object of my question is in the room. Common decency would dictate that you keep from saying anything that would wound her feelings. So I thought I’d ask you while she was being measured so that I could know which way the wind blows and plan accordingly.”

He stared. “Plan? Accordingly?” Did Wellington know about this girl, he wondered, and if so had she sat in on the strategy sessions for Waterloo? If she hadn’t been still in the schoolroom at the time, he would have little difficulty believing it were true.

“Yes,” she explained patiently, as if she were talking to a child. “If you do have some sort of finer feelings for my cousin, then it would behoove you to act on them sooner rather than later. Her mother is trying to marry her off to Lord Turlington, of all people—do you know him? A more cloying fop I’ve never met! The mere idea of him makes my toes twitch. At any rate, with her mama scheming with Turlington, and Lord Shelby away on diplomatic business, it is up to Cecily and me to make sure that Juliet is saved from her mama’s nefarious plot.”

“And how might you plan to prevent this, Lady Madeline?”

Really, she was quite fascinating. Utterly mad, of course, but still interesting.

“Well, you’ll have to compromise her, of course.”

It was a good thing, Alec reflected, that he had chosen not to take tea, for as his luck was currently running, he would assuredly have been taking a drink when Lady Madeline announced the first portion of her plan, which would have caused him to send a shower of tea out over his breeches.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, “but I thought you just said that I should compromise your cousin.”

“It’s the only way,” she said calmly, taking her own tea without danger of stray showers. “Aunt Rose is a hard woman, my lord. She is as ruthless as the meanest lord of the underworld when it comes to her own wishes. And she wishes for Juliet to marry Lord Turlington. Lord knows why, of course. One never knows with Aunt Rose. She undoubtedly owes him a gambling debt or some other such nonsense. It doesn’t matter, really, since whatever the reason for her debt to him, she will sacrifice Juliet to pay it.”

“How do you know?” he asked.

“Oh, dear.” Lady Madeline frowned. “I had hoped that you were one of the gentlemen who understood that ladies aren’t always as silly as they seem. Pray, do not disabuse me of the notion, for if you are it will quite upset me.”

He started to respond, but she cut him off.

“As I was saying,” she continued, “you need to compromise Juliet. And the sooner, the better. It’s quite easy to get into her bedchamber from the trellis at the back of her father’s town house. We’ve gotten in and out of there half a dozen times in the past few years.”

“Wait!” Alec held up a staying hand. “Lady Madeline, I know you mean well, but really, I cannot simply go about compromising young ladies just because it has been asked of me.”

“No one has made mention of young ladies, my lord,” she snapped. “Only one young lady needs compromising, and I must assure you that it will be the easiest thing in the world…”

Alec felt his eyes goggle.

“Oh, don’t be a goose,” Madeline chided. “Of course I don’t mean that Juliet is of easy virtue. Goodness, you men can be so old-womanish at times. I simply mean that getting into her bedchamber will be quite easy. And once you are found out—and really, all you’ll need to do is ring for a servant and the word will spread like wildfire—then Lord and Lady Shelby will be at great pains to cover the whole thing up. Which they will do, by marrying Juliet off to you posthaste.”

She smiled at him and took another sip of tea, as if she had just told him about a new scheme to provide food to the starving. He was starving, but it was for a large glass of brandy to soothe his nerves.

“Lady Madeline,” he began, only to be interrupted by the arrival of Madame Celeste with an armful of fashion plates. “Ah, yes, excellent. Madame Celeste.”

As if she’d not just encouraged him to creep into her cousin’s bedchamber and ruin her, Lady Madeline brightened at Madame Celeste and began to thumb through the sketches.

“Oh, this is lovely,” she said, pointing to a simply styled morning gown. “I believe this would suit Juliet admirably.”

Still slightly stunned, Alec nodded, and turned his attention to the fashion plates. But all he could think of was Miss Shelby, flushed with sleep, and laid out on her bed as if she were his for the taking. Which was utterly ridiculous, he firmly told himself. He had no such designs on Miss Shelby and the sooner he realized it, the better.

Even so, it was going to be a long, long afternoon.

Six

In the back of Madame Celeste’s establishment, Juliet was trying her best to keep from disrobing in front of the seamstresses.

“Can you not simply take my measurements while I remain clothed?” she asked the modiste, whom the frustrated first assistant had summoned. “I am not comfortable with removing my garments for an audience.”

Juliet knew it was odd of her to be so adamant, but she knew how gossip was spread, and if anyone at Madame Celeste’s guessed her secret all her years of maintaining the fiction that her accident had merely left her with a mangled foot would have been in vain.

For her own part, she cared little of what the
ton
thought. She had long ago come to the realization that the loss of her foot had been a small price to pay when compared with what might have happened that day in Vienna. Since returning to England she had become aware of just how many people died from simple blood loss when physicians removed their mangled limbs. The only embarrassment, to her mind, came from the knowledge that she had survived not because of any divine providence, but simply because of an accident of birth. If she’d been born to a poorer family, it was doubtful that she would have received such excellent care.

Expecting the modiste to be impatient with her request, Juliet was instead surprised to see compassion in the woman’s eyes.

“You do not wish to show the scars, eh?” Madame Celeste gestured to her feet.

At Juliet’s nod, the older woman nodded. “All right, then. You will go into the little room and remove your clothing. We take the measurements from those.”

Relieved that she would not be forced to defend herself further, Juliet followed the first assistant to the fitting room.

“Take off everything but your shift,” the assistant told her, as she unfastened Juliet’s gown at the back. “I will wait just outside so that you may hand them to me. It will take longer this way, you know.”

But Juliet didn’t care about the time, so long as her secret remained secret.

She undressed quickly and, clothes in hand, she opened the door, giving the assistant her stays, corset, and gown.

Now, shivering in her shift, she lowered herself to the overstuffed chair situated in the corner of the tiny room. Wishing all this might have been accomplished without her being separated from Madeline and Deveril, she wondered what the two of them were discussing while they examined fashion plates.

She had noticed the way Deveril watched her cousin. Had even been made jealous by it. It was ridiculous for her to mistake his interest in helping her find Anna for an interest in her, but when she felt the intensity of his gaze, she had a difficult time remembering just why the notion was so foolish.

There were a number of reasons why it made more sense for a man like him to set his sights on Madeline rather than Juliet. For one thing, Madeline was healthy and hale. In fact, she was ridiculously robust and enjoyed nothing more than a vigorous ride in the park, or a country ramble. For another, Madeline, with her fashionable blond crop and short stature, was to Juliet’s mind the epitome of a pocket Venus. Yes, she might be lumped in with Juliet and Cecily—well, just Juliet now really—as an Ugly Duckling, but there was nothing remotely ugly about Lady Madeline Essex. She might have a tendency to speak her mind overmuch, and had at times entered into discussions that made her less than comfortable company, but overall, Juliet thought that with the exception of the highest sticklers, Madeline had far more chance of marrying well and overcoming her less than stellar social status than she did.

Which was, of course, why Juliet spent her time waiting in the back of Madame Celeste’s shop imagining her cousin and Lord Deveril, their angelic blond heads together, getting along famously and planning to elope to Gretna Green as soon as the opportunity presented itself. He would declare himself on bended knee, a beam of sunlight shining down from the heavens to denote their approval of the match, while Madeline, a light wind ruffling her golden curls, smiled her acceptance of his proposal. And they would live happily ever after in connubial bliss while Juliet grew older and, having refused her mother’s insistence that she marry Turlington, lived as an unpaid servant with her brother Matthew and his unpleasant bride, the former Miss Snowe.

It was on these unhappy thoughts that Juliet dwelled as she heard an exclamation from the other side of the door, and the murmur of voices.

“She can’t be gone!” hissed the first assistant. “She promised me that she would be back today at the latest.”

“Well, according to her note she won’t be coming back,” said a second, harder voice.

“Let me see it,” the first assistant demanded.

The rustle of paper indicated that the note had exchanged hands.

“Why would she do this?” asked another voice, doubtless one of the seamstresses. “Jane needs this position if she wants to get her daughter back. And why would she go off with such a one as him? She said she’d never trust a man again.”

“For enough money I’d go off with old baggy eyes. At least he’s got the blunt to pay for nice clothes and a fancy house. It’s a sight better than being ordered about by Madame and her hoity-toity customers.”

“That’s because you’re no better than you should be, Hetty,” said the other girl. “Jane ain’t like you. She don’t want a man’s money. She wants an honest wage and a way to get her baby back. I don’t believe it. She wouldn’t leave London again. Not when she’s so close to having enough money to bring her little girl back.”

“I don’t like it,” the first assistant said, her voice clipped. “I don’t think she would leave on her own either. And didn’t she say she thought she’d been followed last week?”

“Aye,” said Hetty. “She said some gent she didn’t know was following her from her rooms to here and back again.”

Juliet shivered. She remembered Jane from a previous visit to Madame Celeste’s with her mother. She had seemed a gentle, well-mannered young woman. Not at all the sort who would leave behind her child for a frivolous reason. And, unfortunately, Jane’s plight sounded quite similar to Anna’s. From the mysterious note, to the man following her, to the existence of a child.

“Right,” she heard the first assistant say sharply. “No more about Jane. We’ll lose our own positions if we don’t get back to work.”

“But Meggie, what if whoever took Jane takes a fancy to me or Hetty? What then?”

The first assistant, Meggie, made an impatient noise that sounded much like Madame Celeste. “Just stay together. Don’t go anywhere alone.”

“Are you going to tell Madame?” Hetty demanded. “Maybe she’ll hire another footman to watch out for us.”

The silence was deafening. So much for Madame, Juliet thought wryly.

“Just be careful,” Meggie repeated. “Now, Hetty, take these back to Miss Shelby and escort her to the front.”

Juliet heard the rustle of fabric as the first assistant handed her clothing back to Hetty.

At the brisk knock on the door, she opened it to peek out.

“Here are your clothes, miss,” Hetty, who was rather unfortunate-looking, said quietly. “Let me know and I’ll do up your back. You’re ready to leave, I think.”

“Thank you,” Juliet told her, closing the door again to keep her curious eyes from looking at her feet.

Quickly, she got dressed and a moment later, her walking stick in hand, she was following the seamstress back to the front of the shop.

“I heard your conversation about your friend,” she told the girl as they walked. “Can you tell me where she lived?”

Hetty stopped and turned to look at her. “Begging your pardon, miss,” she said, “but what can you care about a shopgirl going missing?”

If she’d asked such a question of Lady Shelby, Juliet guessed that her mother would report the insolence to her mistress at once. Since she was hardly her mother, she simply shrugged. “I have a friend who disappeared under similar circumstances and wondered if the two might be connected.”

This seemed to satisfy Hetty, for she gave a brisk nod and told her Jane’s address. Which happened to be one street over from Mrs. Turner’s flat.

“It’s not like her, miss,” Hetty said. “She’s a good girl. She wouldn’t just leave her babe for some man.”