Kate Moore (19 page)

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BLACKSTONE’S BRIDE

Available August 2012 from Berkley Sensation

Prologue

The English Channel, February, 1825

Lyle Massing, Baron Blackstone, was losing at cards, a situation he could only attribute to the rise and fall of the ship under him. The HMS
Redemption,
a naval vessel of questionable seaworthiness, had been pressed into service to bring Blackstone and a few other survivors of the Greek misadventure home.

He tried to concentrate on the cards in his hand and not think about home. At the moment he didn’t have one. Blackstone Court, the ancestral seat he’d inherited from his father, had been mortgaged to pay his ransom to the Greek warlord Vasiladi. The house was now leased to a wealthy maker of crockery. Blackstone’s widowed mother and sisters had removed to a modest townhouse in Bath. His mother made no complaint, but in her letter about the move, his sister Elena had double underlined the words “thirty feet,” the distance between their two drawing rooms in Bath. When he thought of his mother in such narrow circumstances after the vastness of Blackstone Court, he grew a little reckless with his cards, and already a pile of his vowels littered the table.

Beating its way across the channel to Dover, the
Redemption
lurched and shuddered, making the yellow light waver in the smoky compartment. Blackstone blinked at the unforgiving cards in his hand. His opponent, Samuel Goldsworthy, a large mound of a man with thick red hair and beard and a green silk waistcoat that glowed in the swaying light, grinned at him. The fellow seemed incapable of ill humor or of losing. It was he who had proposed a little harmless game of cards. Hours earlier, the endless card game and the rolling seas had defeated the other two passengers. Only Goldsworthy and Blackstone remained at the table.

The big man could not conceal his satisfaction with the situation. “Son, those cards you’re holding are worthless. Let me offer you a way out.”

Blackstone felt an unsettling prickle of wariness as if the man could see his hand. He made a joke. “Is this the moment when you suggest that I marry your quiz of a daughter?” If Goldsworthy had such a daughter, Blackstone might do it. He had few options to recover his estate.

Goldsworthy gave a head-splittingly hearty laugh. Blackstone had suggested a marriage in jest, but as if in protest at the idea of his marrying, his careless memory threw up a flash of laughing black eyes and soft creamy breasts. He shook it off. That opportunity had long since passed. No doubt Violet Hammersley had married while Blackstone was in the hands of the bandits.

“Nothing so clichéd, lad. All I ask is that you enter my employ for a year and a day.”

Blackstone noted the fairy-tale phrase. A year and a day was also the amount of time he had been a captive, a year and a day, in which Byron had died, and the Greek freedom fighters who had sought to throw off the Turks had fallen into rival factions, apt to cut each other’s throats.

He peered again at Goldsworthy. The man looked ordinary enough in spite of his oak-like size and the absurd invitation to employment. He was taller than Blackstone by four inches or more, and wider than any of the berths offered on the ship. Blackstone put his age at somewhere between forty and fifty. He looked like a great leafy tree with his russet coat, walnut trousers, and the green waistcoat. For all the stirring of Blackstone’s instincts at the man’s odd turn of phrase, the fellow was most likely not an enchanter out of a fairy tale, but an ordinary London merchant. He probably had a warehouse on the Thames stuffed with bolts of muslin or sacks of coffee beans.

But Blackstone’s year with the bandits had taught him to be wary of appearances. He could not help a suspicion that Goldsworthy was not what he appeared to be. The timing of the arrival of Goldsworthy and the
Redemption
in Koron harbor at the singularly delicate moment in Blackstone’s negotiations with the bandit, when the money was about to change hands, was more than fortuitous. It was miraculous. At that moment, Blackstone had realized there was no reason for Vasiladi to follow through with the release of his hostages, including a score of young girls and boys who had been pressed into slavish roles by the warlord’s army. Blackstone’s whole mission to Greece had hung in the balance.

He tried again to determine Goldsworthy’s true nature. “I suppose you’re a cesspool cleaner or a shambles operator.”

“Nothing so fragrant, or so tame, I assure you, lad. Something rather more suited to your talents.”

“We didn’t meet in London, did we?”

“Not at all.”

“Why offer to hire me? You can’t have a high estimate of my talents based on our little game.”

“You are a charming fellow—”

Blackstone shot Goldsworthy a skeptical glance. “I’ve hardly charmed you.”

“Still among your own, among the ton, you move with grace and ease, wear a well-cut coat, show a pretty leg on the dance floor, and perhaps off of it, drive and ride to an inch.”

“You’ve heard of me then. What you’ve heard can hardly recommend me for anyone’s employ.”

“Except mine. You’ll be invited everywhere, and I want you to attend as many of the season’s events as you can.”

Maybe there was an ugly daughter after all. Maybe she was so plain and so awkward that Goldsworthy needed to prevail on a man of Blackstone’s reputation to escort her to balls and routs. “And for submitting to the endless social whirl?”

“I will pay off all your debts, including the mortgage on Blackstone Court.”

In captivity, Blackstone had learned not to betray the least sign of discomposure, but he felt a rush of mortifying heat. The pile of scraps on which Blackstone and his luckless fellow travelers had pledged their funds to Goldsworthy lay on the table. Blackstone glanced from them to the dismal cards in his hand. Luck had been against him all night, and now the stranger who had managed to fleece them all was offering him what he most needed.

“I beg your pardon.” Blackstone stared hard at the man who seemed to know more of his business than anyone, outside of his solicitor.

“Come with me to my club, and I’ll explain.”

“Your club?” The blunt fellow did not strike Blackstone as a clubman. Goldsworthy might be English to the core, but he was no gentleman.

“The Pantheon Club in Albemarle Street. I’ve a post chaise meeting the ship. It will take us directly there.”

Not to Bath and his mother’s reproaches, but to London and a chance to repair his fortune. Goldsworthy certainly knew how to dangle temptation, but Blackstone needed to know what was behind the man’s apparent generosity.

“Who are you?”

Goldsworthy frowned. “You can’t have forgotten already.”

“Not your name. Who are you? What’s this mysterious position you’re offering?”

“Quite right to ask. Service to king and country, that’s what it is.” Goldsworthy’s good-humored expression remained unimpaired. “It’s spying actually.”

“Spying? On whom would I be spying in the drawing rooms of London?”

Goldsworthy’s expression turned grim. He shook his great, lionlike head. “It’s a black world we live in these days, lad. England’s enemies pass themselves off as friends every day and move among us, high and low. And secrets have a way of falling into their hands. It’s our job to prevent those secrets from going astray.”

Blackstone blinked at the man, as if his eyes were not working properly in the dim, smoke-filled cabin. He was being asked to become a spy for England.

The ship paused on a peak. Then the treacherous ocean shifted, and they fell into a stomach-seizing nothingness as if the world had vanished. Goldsworthy calmly clamped a hand around his ale pot. Blackstone caught the lamp. Everything else hit the low ceiling. In that moment of free fall, nothing to grab, nothing to lose that wasn’t lost already, he saw again the flash of laughing black eyes and wanted against all reason to see them once more, which was madness.

The long fall ended as the
Redemption
slammed into another wave, shuddered mightily, and decided not to splinter into driftwood.

“I’ll do it.”

“That’s the good lad. A year and a day, then you’ll be free and clear.”

Chapter One

Everybody declared that he was the wickedest young man in the world; and everybody began to find out, that they had always distrusted the appearance of his goodness.

—Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

London. Three weeks later.

Blackstone opened one eye to squint at the vault of the ceiling above him, pale as a bride cake and distant as the moon. The cushioned surface under him didn’t heave or shudder. He remembered.
Goldsworthy’s club. Albemarle Street. London.

He was not in a cave. He had not witnessed a beheading in weeks or seen a thirteen-year-old slave given to a brutal man as a prize. Sometimes on waking, it took him awhile to dismiss the images his sleeping mind released.

“Wilde, open that drapery, and you’re a dead man.” The menacing voice came from another sofa in the cavernous coffee room of Goldsworthy’s club where Blackstone and his fellow spies had ended the previous night.

Rain, English rain, cool and fitful, battered a window somewhere and rattled a drainpipe. The freshness of it was another reminder that he was home.

“Good morning to you, Lord Hazelwood. Coffee?” A now familiar voice, young and unreasonably cheerful, came with a hint of London’s East End in the flattened vowels.
Coffee
sounded like
cawfy
in Blackstone’s ears, but the smell induced him to lift his head.

A groan came from a third couch, but the purposeful clink of china went on, and the coffee smell intensified.

“Lord Blackstone?” The young male voice was now at his side. Blackstone pushed upright and swung his feet to the floor. Nate Wilde, Goldsworthy’s protégé, was both a sort of majordomo at the club and their access to Goldsworthy himself. The youth, dressed in a fashionable ink blue coat and buff trousers, thrust a steaming cup of coffee at him and Blackstone took it. Impossible not to—the stuff smelled so good.

He watched Wilde coax the room’s other two occupants to wakefulness. For a few minutes there was silence, while the coffee worked to make the world a bearable place in which a man could speak civilly to his fellows.

Blackstone drank, grateful for the relative quiet and calm of the coffee room. It was the one fully furnished room in the club at the moment, as the rest of the place was undergoing renovations that Goldsworthy had failed to mention in his recruiting pitch.

Scaffolding surrounded the building, and each day an army of carpenters, plasterers, masons, and bricklayers appeared early and set to banging away and raising a good deal of dust. Curtains of canvas concealed halls and staircases.

The coffee room, however, was a quiet, wholly male space with a lack of fuss or frill, darkly paneled with deep leather chairs, a rich swirling carpet of reds, blues, and golds, well-stocked bookcases, and a gleaming silver coffee urn on a table clad in crisp white linen.

Blackstone’s fellow spies were Captain Clare, a hero of Waterloo, in scarlet regimentals, and Viscount Hazelwood, the Earl of Vange’s disinherited heir. Wild-haired Hazelwood wore a rumpled black evening coat over white satin breeches that might have once been pristine, but now bore stains to make a man’s valet weep or faint. Though Blackstone and his fellow spies had shared little of the circumstances that had brought them to Goldsworthy’s employ, Blackstone had pieced together what he could about the other two.

Each had signed a contract with Goldsworthy that Clare claimed was legal, and that Hazelwood declared was tight as a vicar’s ass. Each had been assigned a rung of London’s social ladder as his territory. Clare haunted low taverns frequented by soldiers, sailors, and radicals. Hazelwood moved between gaming halls and brothels. And Blackstone had been assigned the fashionable West End.

His first assignment was Lady Ravenhurst, whose politically ambitious husband often carried foreign office dispatches to and from his library at home. Gossip claimed that lonely Lady Ravenhurst was seeking diversion in the arms of a Russian count, whose designs were perhaps on secret documents rather than the lady. Goldsworthy had assigned Blackstone to make himself agreeable enough to cut the count out of the running as the lady’s lover.

As the coffee began to have an effect, the captain addressed Wilde.

“Where did you learn to make coffee this good, Wilde?”

Hazelwood answered for the boy. “He’s a Turk and was a slave in Istanbul under the sultan.”

Wilde’s grin revealed a gleaming set of white teeth. “London born and bred, gentlemen. An old soldier named Harding taught me. You lot will likely meet him on some case or other.”

“Couldn’t he have taught you to make porter?”

Wilde shrugged, his grin fading. “No porter for you, Lord Hazelwood.”

Clare lifted his cup in a toast, “Sobriety, solvency, and celibacy. That’s the motto here.” Clare was a wiry redhead with a far-seeing look. Blackstone had no trouble imagining him leading his men through the chaos of a smoking battlefield.

“It will make you fit as a prizefighter, Captain.”

“It’ll make us duller than moss growing.” Hazelwood stared morosely at his coffee.

Wilde laughed, apparently unperturbed at his charges’ grousing. “Not for long, I’ll wager.” He tapped the gleaming silver vessel on the cloth-covered table. “The urn’s full. Newspapers are here. Ring when you’re hungry.”

After he left, silence descended on the room for a time. Then Hazelwood turned to Blackstone. “So how are you getting on with Lady Ravenhurst?”

“Well enough.” The lady had sent him a pointed invitation to join her guests for an evening of song, making it clear that her husband would not be present. So he had spent the previous evening shoulder to shoulder with the fashionable of London in a row of gilded chairs enduring the heat of candles and close bodies and a lady’s fan occasionally drawn across his thigh by the movement of her arm. The Russian count had been conspicuously absent. Blackstone would have a good report to make to Goldsworthy. “And you?”

Hazelwood was following the missteps of a set of fashionable youngbloods, one of whom had an older brother in the cabinet.

“It’s been a purgatorial fortnight, and I’ve got nothing.” Hazelwood staggered to his feet, refilled his cup from the urn, and tucked one of the newspapers under his arm. “How is a man to think with an army of carpenters banging away and not a drop of liquor to be got out of that inscrutable whelp of a tailor’s dummy, who claims to be at our service?”

Blackstone had to laugh. Wilde cheerfully directed them to anything they needed and nothing they wanted. They had a valet, Twickler, and if they needed funds or a carriage, Wilde arranged them. Around the corner from the club, but accessible to it through connecting back gardens, was a chemist’s shop on Bond Street that supplied them with all the accessories of men of fashion. Kirby, the artist who dressed Goldsworthy’s stable of spies had frowned at Blackstone’s color and thinness. But to his credit he had turned a man who had eaten subsistent rations for a year into a model of wealth and fashion. No one would guess he still bore the effects of his captivity.

This morning Clare’s gaze seemed to sharpen as the coffee took effect. “Blackstone, whatever happened to that painting of your mistress, the Spanish dancer, the one that made you notorious?”

Hazelwood’s brows lifted. “What’s this? Blackstone, you sly dog. You never mentioned a scandal. I guess that answers the question about why you landed here. Did your family disown you?”

“The title was mine.”

“Ah, the title and the tittle-tattle. The print shops must have enjoyed your folly. Goldsworthy’s genius begins to reveal itself.” Hazelwood put his cup on the floor and settled back down on his couch, opening the newspaper and pulling it over his face. Blackstone turned to Clare, who leaned forward, his coffee cup in both hands.

“Hazelwood has a theory about why Goldsworthy tapped us for this work, which your situation rather confirms. Hazelwood thinks that Goldsworthy picked us for our notoriety.”

“I thought spies were discreet fellows.”

“Hazelwood thinks, and I see his point, that if a man’s reputation is fixed in the public mind, no one will suspect him of being anything other than what he is by reputation.”

“So you’re a hero, Hazelwood is a wastrel . . .”

“And you’re a rake.”

Blackstone had to acknowledge the logic of it. People tended to see what they expected to see.

He’d now spent a fortnight back in London, and had discovered that the scandalous painting that had made his reputation at four and twenty still defined him. He had never guessed, in the stunned moment of seeing that painting for the first time, that it would come to define
him
. Nor had he understood how impossible it was to shake a scandal. At twenty-four he had been free in his assumption of power and privilege. He had believed that he alone defined his place in the world’s eyes. No painter, a mere dabbler in oils, in a reeking studio, could hurt a peer of the realm. He’d been wrong.

When he refused to pay for the painting, the painter Royce made it public, and scandal broke over his head. Sobriquets for his mighty manhood appeared repeatedly in the sort of doggerel the gossip sheets indulged in. Women he’d never met left their cards. He was invited to the masquerades and the balls of the demimonde and expected to arrive wherever general debauchery might ensue. At the time he could hardly protest that he was not a scoundrel. He had made a promise. While raffish strangers flocked to make his acquaintance, his betrothed and his family had broken all connection with him.

Wilde strode back into the room carrying a covered basket. Outside the daily hammering began.

“Where’s Goldsworthy?” Blackstone wanted to make his daily report.

“Never where you need him.” Hazelwood’s newspaper rustled over his concealed face. “Damned elusive fellow. Comes and goes like a ghost.”

“Mr. Goldsworthy does a bit of fishing now and then.” Wilde deposited his basket of fresh rolls. “As a matter of fact, he’s waiting for you this morning, Lord Blackstone.”

“Time to pay the piper, Blackstone,” Hazelwood mumbled from under his paper.

Wilde glanced at Hazelwood’s recumbent form. “Your turn will come, Lord Hazelwood.”