Kasey Michaels (13 page)

“Ah, you’ve been struck mute. Another piece of good news to gladden my heart,” Simon quipped, really beginning to feel quite extraordinarily good. “Now, go away upstairs with Emery like a brave little conspirator. We’ll meet again tomorrow morning, when I’ll expect you in my study at nine. Not a second later. We have considerable work to do.”

He went to leave the room, then turned about to look at her assessingly. “We’ll start with the hair, I believe.”
And some deceptive, creative use of cotton padding to increase that nonexistent chest
, he added silently.

“What’s wrong with my hair?” Callie asked, reaching up a hand to the poorly trimmed chestnut mass.

“If you don’t know that, Caledonia Johnston, I can see that this new plan of mine will be more work than my mother and I will be able to wade through on our own. Expect Mr. Gauthier and Mr. Boothe also to be in my study when you arrive. And perhaps a small army of nuns hired on to pray for us all.”

“What—what if we do all this work and Noel Kinsey still doesn’t want to marry me, you insufferable prig? Have you thought of that?” she called after Simon, who halted in the doorway, looking to Emery, who only shook his head and grinned.

“If the dowry were large enough, Noel Kinsey would agree to bracket himself to your friend Lester,” he explained patiently. “You see, the mamas of most young girls with large dowries won’t let Kinsey within a mile of their daughters. In that, you will be different.”

“Oh,” Callie said, deflated, as if that statement made perfect sense to her. But then she rallied, calling after him, “But I warn you, Brockton, stop calling me Caledonia!”

Simon hesitated for a moment, considered answering her, then only smiled and walked on toward his study. He had been right the first time. Caledonia Johnston was little more than a child, for all of her nearly nineteen years. An inordinately appealing child. Mischievous. Adventuresome. Easily led. She’d fallen for his outlandish lies as fast as he could conjure them up and then push them past his lips.

Let his mother entertain herself in bringing the young heathen up to snuff, believing she could first parade her protégé through Society, and then marry her off to her only son. It might take her mind off this damnable idea of turning herself from an oak into a willow and then snagging herself an earl.

Let Miss Johnston believe herself to be an integral part of a grand scheme to bring Filton down, so that she’d allow herself to become Imogene’s willing little doll.

Let them both, two very similar-thinking, interfering females, enjoy themselves to the top of their bents while they remained safely out from under his feet and away from the action.

Leaving him free to destroy Noel Kinsey, just as he’d been planning all along.

Kindred Spirits?

“Contrariwise,” continued Tweedledee,

“if it was so, it might be;

and if it were so, it would be;

but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.”

—Charles Lutwidge Dodgson

if you are elsewhere live as they live elsewhere.

—Saint Ambrose

Chapter Six

C
ontrary to her son’s oft-repeated wishes concerning the matter—even his demands, backed by his remarkably well-articulated threats alluding to lonely dower houses and diets of stale bread and ditch water—the determined viscountess did
not
allow the planned meeting in Simon’s study to take place the next morning.

In fact, she did not permit him within earshot let alone within sight of Caledonia Johnston for the remainder of the week and half of the next. What Imogene did do was to keep the girl locked up in the best guest bedchamber, secreted behind a door that was opened only to admit Imogene, her maid, Kathleen, and a small army of Roxbury servants summoned for one reason or another.

Also privileged to enter were a small battalion of milliners, dressmakers, and other grinning tradespeople. The latter then bowed themselves out of the Portland Place mansion with thanks dripping from their lips, grateful tears in their eyes, and their heads whirling at the thought of their anticipated profits.

Roberts, as a matter of fact, had told Callie that he’d heard one of the tradesmen whisper to his rather comely, giggling assistant that the Tunbridge Wells cottage he’d had an eye on to rent for the space of a month after the Season ended and his wife had gone off to visit her mother in Liverpool was now within their reach. Callie, fairly gently bred, but by no means stupid or starchy, had felt this news to be quite the funniest thing she had heard in days, then went back to sulking because she was stuck staring at the four walls of the guest chamber while the rest of the world were free to come and go as they pleased.

Not that her prison was all that uncomfortable. It certainly was a far cry from her modest chamber at home, boasting a high tester bed that cradled her like an infant at night, so that she slept dreamlessly and awoke each day eager to discover what lay in store for her next.

Her windows looked out over Portland Place, and, although she was not allowed to set a single foot out onto the balcony during the day, she had several times cracked open the floor-to-ceiling windows at night. She would then sneak outside to sit with her nightgown-covered legs tucked up beneath her chin, gazing up at the stars that shone over London, and down at the world she had stumbled into willy-nilly, landing on her head when she could just as easily have ended up in gaol, or worse.

The true stupidity of her now-discarded plan to revenge Justyn’s ill fortune on the earl of Filton had come home to roost with a vengeance. The luxury of time to reflect on just how harebrained her scheme had been showed her how cavalierly she had gone about this business of vengeance. She’d acted with not a thought to her own safety or, more importantly, to Lester’s well-being. Her thoughts shamed her, shamed her deeply.

She’d also had time to consider, and mull over, and begin to like very much indeed, the viscount’s plan to bring Filton low. It had been her wonderful new friend, Emery, who had told her of Brockton’s finesse with the cards. Apparently he had honed his skills courtesy of Armand Gauthier, who over the years had been, also according to Emery, both a card shark and a privateer of some note. Why, according to the admiring Emery, Gauthier had even sailed with Jean Lafitte, the pirate who had once been the terror and pride of New Orleans, in America.

At least those were the tales Gauthier wove for people who dared to inquire about his background, Emery told her, not that the butler believed the half of it himself. Although he was convinced that the man’s considerable wealth had been the result of ill-gotten gains in some way.

Callie could barely wait to see Armand Gauthier again.

And then there was Bartholomew Boothe, the man Emery said was called Bones. Emery was not quite as enamored of him, for the man was not at all spectacular. He did not press a coin into the butler’s palm each time he fetched him his hat and gloves, the way Gauthier did.

But Emery also said that the painfully thin Bartholomew Bones could down a full two ribs of beef in less time than it took to cook it, and still find a moment between bites to lecture everyone else at the table on the ills of eating red meat. And that, Emery said, was
very
impressive! Mr. Boothe would expound on those ills, such as gout and rheumatism, and all sorts of ailments he would then explain in such lurid detail that the viscountess had, more than once, found it necessary to aim a hot, crusty roll at his head to shut him up.

Oh, yes. Dinner with Bartholomew Bones was definitely on the list of entertainments Callie looked forward to—if she was ever let out of this pampered prison!

One reason for her discontent was that Lester, unlike the carefully incarcerated Callie, had been left free to run tame throughout the mansion once his clothing had been rescued from Horsemonger Lane. Not that he appeared downstairs other than for his thrice-daily meals in the ornate ground-floor dining room, for which he would have risked death itself, let alone Simon’s piercing stares and pointed questions about how on earth any man of sense had allowed himself to be talked into the most infantile, ludicrous scheme in history.

And so, for the most part, Lester became one of the small party that seemed to be constantly in progress inside Callie’s wondrously opulent cell, the single Portland Place male besides Emery and Roberts who had permission to enter this new, private sanctuary.

Callie knew she would be let out of the bedchamber once the viscountess was satisfied with her appearance: with her dress, her hair, her deportment. And as Callie had not, contrary to her last governess’s opinion, been reared in a stables, she already felt confident that she would not disappoint the viscountess when it came time to be introduced to a peer of the realm or pick up the correct spoon at a formal dinner.

She could also reach down from the saddle and pick up a handkerchief while riding at a full gallop, shoot the pips from a playing card at ten paces—Justyn could shoot them out from twenty—climb a tree faster than Lester, and beat her father at chess nine times out of each ten games played.

But she hadn’t thought the viscountess needed to know those things, believing that the astute woman might already have guessed at them anyway.

And so, after ten days spent in the guest chamber, being scrubbed and buffed and measured and pinned, Callie would have to say that, for the most part, she was happy enough—and fairly willing to be a good girl and behave herself.

Callie’s main source of discontent had been from the beginning and remained that of the existence of one Simon Roxbury, Viscount Brockton. She didn’t like him. Liked his mother. Liked his servants. Liked his friends. Liked his house. She simply didn’t like
him
. Not a jot. Not a jigger. Not a whisker.

He was arrogant, for one thing. She knew, because she was herself arrogant, and could recognize the condition.

He was also domineering, verbose—if verbose meant that he could talk a person to death—overweening, dictatorial, rude to his loving if rather unique mother, and maybe just plain mean into the bargain. He certainly had not, Callie knew, shown a single qualm in kidnapping her straight off the street, then locking her up in his house just as if he had the right.

The fact that he was handsome only added to her irritation with the man. She was convinced he knew how very ingratiating he looked when he ran his fingers through his hair, deliberately mussing it as he attempted to look innocent, and flustered, and sickeningly adorable.

He knew how his sun-kissed skin arranged itself into attractive crinkles around his sherry-colored eyes when he smiled, so that he deliberately smiled often, just to annoy her.

And he knew that he was tall, so that he could tower over her, look down on her from his great height, show his well-tailored clothes to good advantage. Why, he probably impressed any number of idiotic young misses who looked up at him worshipfully as he strolled by, tipping his curly-brimmed beaver and twirling his whitethorn cane.

In all, the man was a menace. No, she didn’t like him. Didn’t like him at all. Definitely. She’d use him, allow him to use her to a certain extent as, together, they worked to destroy Noel Kinsey. Yes, he was giving her a Season—in a way. Yes, she would be going to Almack’s. But that was all part of the viscount’s plan, not some sort of gift for which she should be grateful.

And she wouldn’t be. Grateful, that was. She would just do what she had to do: punish Noel Kinsey. And then she would walk away without a backward glance, without a qualm, without a single regret that Viscount Brockton had looked upon her as an opportunity, and not as a person at all.

She smiled at a sudden thought. No. He didn’t look upon her as a person at all. Except when he was exasperated with her, that was.

With luck, she might be able to exasperate him any number of times in an infinite variety of ways.

If she wanted to. Which she didn’t.

Did she?

She did not! And with good reason, too. Very good reason!

“Sheila Lloyd,” Callie grumbled under her breath, the woman’s name, mentioned only once, days earlier, still stuck annoyingly inside her head.

“Did you say something, Callie?” Lester asked as he sat crossed-legged on the floor of the bedchamber, a bowl of ripe plums on his lap.

“Nothing worth repeating,” she said quickly, mentally slapping herself for the twists and turns her mind had taken, leading her to thinking about Sheila Lloyd—the
married
Sheila Lloyd, if she had understood the viscountess correctly. After all, it wasn’t as if she cared a fig about Simon Roxbury’s life or the people who filled it.

“Will you be having your face all painted like that for much longer, Callie?” Lester asked, comically wrinkling his nose at his friend’s appearance, so that she let out her breath in a sigh, grateful for her friend’s interruption of her disturbing thoughts. “Turns me off my food, it does, and no lie.”

Callie, wiggling her nose, which had begun to itch as the pinkish white paste of cream and crushed strawberries began to dry on her skin, spoke without moving her lips. “Imogene swears the freckles are fading,” she said, looking down at the backs of her hands, also liberally slathered with the sweet-smelling but sticky concoction. She had yet to understand all this trouble to rid her of a few freckles she’d gathered while walking about town without her parasol—which would have looked dashed strange with her inexpressibles. But if Imogene wanted them gone, then she’d cooperate and get them gone. “Do you have a knife with you, Lester?”