Lord of Scoundrels (10 page)

Even before Dain’s laughter had faded and he’d disappeared into the garden’s shadows, Jessica was dragging herself from the black pit of humiliated despair into which he’d dropped her. There was no choice but to lift her chin and face the next moment and all the moments to come. She faced the onlookers, daring them to utter an insult. One by one, they turned their backs and silently retreated.

Only one came forward. Vawtry was shrugging out of his coat as, clutching her bodice to cover herself, Jessica leapt down from the sarcophagus. He hastened toward her with the coat.

“I tried,” he said unhappily, his eyes tactfully averted while she wrapped his coat about her. “I told them Dain had left alone and you had gone to look for your grandmother, but one of the servants had seen you enter the sun parlor…” He paused. “I’m sorry.”

“I should like to make a discreet exit,” she said, keeping her voice expressionless. “Would you be kind enough to find Lady Pembury?”

“I hate to leave you alone,” he said.

“I don’t faint,” she said. “I don’t indulge in hysterics. I’ll be quite all right.”

He gave her a worried glance, then hurried away.

As soon as he was gone, Jessica pulled off his coat and restored her gown to rights as best she could without her maid. She couldn’t reach all the fastenings, most of which were in back, but she found enough to secure the bodice, so that she didn’t have to hold it up. While she struggled with the ties and hooks, she reviewed her situation with brutal objectivity.

She knew it hardly mattered that Dain hadn’t ravished her. What mattered was that it had been Dain with whom she’d been caught. That was enough to make her damaged goods in the eyes of all the world.

Within less than twenty-four hours, the story would reach every corner of Paris. Within a week, it would reach London. She could see well enough what the future held.

No self-respecting gentleman would sully his family name by marrying Dain’s leavings. After this, she wouldn’t have a prayer of attracting to her shop the hosts of rich, respectable people her success—and her own respectability—depended upon. Ladies would hold their skirts to keep from brushing against her when they passed, or cross the street to avoid contamination. Gentlemen would cease being gentlemen and subject her to the same indignities they offered the lowliest streetwalker.

With a handful of words, in short, Dain had destroyed her life. On purpose.

All he’d needed to do was sweep one of his deadly glances over them and tell them they’d seen nothing, and they would have decided it was healthiest to agree with him. All the world feared him, even his so-called friends. He could make them do and say and believe what he wanted.

But all he’d wanted was revenge—for whatever it was his twisted mind believed Jessica had done to him. He’d taken her to this garden with no other purpose. She wouldn’t have put it past him to have dropped a hint beforehand to somebody, to make sure the discovery would take place at the most humiliating moment: her bodice undone and sagging to her waist, his tongue down her throat, his filthy hand up her skirt.

Though her face heated at the recollection, she refused to feel ashamed of what she’d done. Her behavior might be accounted indecent by Society’s rules, and misguided according to her own, but it wasn’t evil. She was a healthy young woman who had simply yielded to feelings countless other women yielded to—and might do with impunity if they were married or widowed and discreet about it.

Even though she wasn’t married or widowed, and by normal rules should have been considered out of bounds, she couldn’t, in all fairness, blame him for taking advantage of what was offered so willingly.

But she could and would blame him for refusing to shield her. He had nothing to lose, and he’d known very well that she had everything to lose. He could have helped her. It would have cost him nothing, scarcely an effort. Instead, he’d insulted and abandoned her.

That was the evil. That was the base, unforgivable act.

And that, she resolved, was what he’d pay for.

At half past four in the morning, Dain was holding court in Antoine’s, a restaurant in the Palais Royal. His circle of companions had by this time widened to include a handful of Lady Wallingdon’s guests: Sellowby, Goodridge, Vawtry, and Esmond. The subject of Jessica Trent was scrupulously avoided. Instead, the fight in the cardroom, which Dain had missed—between a drunken Prussian officer and a French republican—and the ensuing mayhem were discussed in detail and at argumentative length.

Even the tarts felt obliged to express their opinions, the one on Dain’s right knee taking the republican side, while the one on the left was squarely with the Prussian. Both argued with a level of ignorance, both political and grammatical, that would have made Bertie Trent seem an intellectual prodigy.

Dain wished he hadn’t thought of Trent. The instant the brother’s image flickered in Dain’s mind, the sister’s arose: Jessica gazing up into his eyes from under an overdecorated bonnet…watching his face while he unbuttoned her glove…hitting him with her bonnet and her small gloved fist…kissing him while lightning flashed and thunder crashed…whirling round a dance floor with him, her skirts rustling about his legs, her face glowing with excitement. And later, in his arms…a fire-storm of images, feelings, and one sweet, anguished moment…when she had kissed his big, loathsome nose…and cut his heart to pieces and put it back together again and made him believe he was not a monster to her. She had made him believe he was beautiful.

Lies, he told himself.

They were all lies and tricks, to trap him. He’d ruined her brother. She had nothing left. Thus, like Susannah, whose brother had gambled away the family fortune, Jessica Trent was desperate enough to set the oldest trap in history to catch herself a rich, titled husband.

But now Dain found himself considering the circle of men about him. All were better prospects altogether.

His gaze lingered upon Esmond, who sat beside him, and was the most beautiful man on three continents, and also very possibly—though no one knew for sure—even wealthier than the Marquess of Dain.

Why not Esmond? Dain asked himself. If she needed a rich spouse, why should a quick-witted female like Jessica Trent choose Beelzebub over the Angel Gabriel, hell rather than heaven?

Esmond’s blue gaze met his. “
Amore è cieco
,” he murmured in perfect Florentine accents.

Love is blind.

Dain recollected Esmond telling him a few weeks ago about “bad feelings” regarding
Vingt-Huit
, and recalled the events that had taken place almost immediately thereafter. Gazing at him now, Dain had an uncomfortable feeling of his own: that the angelic count was reading his mind, just as he’d read clues, invisible to everyone else, about the now defunct palace of sin.

Dain was opening his mouth to deliver a crushing setdown when Esmond stiffened, and his head turned slightly, his gaze fixing elsewhere while his smile faded.

Dain looked that way, too—toward the door—but at first he could see nothing, because Sellowby had leaned over to refill his glass.

Then Sellowby lounged back again in his chair.

Then Dain saw her.

She wore a dark red gown, buttoned up to the throat, and a black shawl draped like a mantilla over her head and shoulders. Her face was white and hard. She strode toward the large table, chin high, silver eyes flashing, and paused a few feet away.

His heart crashed and thundered into a hectic gallop that made it impossible to breathe, let alone speak.

Her glance flicked over his companions.

“Go away,” she said in a low, hard voice.

The whores leapt from his lap, knocking over glasses in their haste. His friends bolted up from their places and backed away. A chair toppled and crashed to the floor unheeded.

Only Esmond kept his head. “Mademoiselle,” he began, his tones gentle, mollifying.

She flung back the shawl and lifted her right hand. There was a pistol in it, the barrel aimed straight at Dain’s heart. “Go away,” she told Esmond.

Dain heard the click as she cocked the weapon and the scrape of a chair as Esmond rose. “Mademoiselle,” he tried again.

“Say your prayers, Dain,” she said.

His gaze lifted from the pistol to her glittering, furious eyes. “Jess,” he whispered.

She pulled the trigger.

T
he shot threw Dain back against his chair, which crashed to the floor with him.

Jessica brought the pistol down, let out the breath she’d been holding, then turned and walked away.

It took the onlookers a few moments to make their brains comprehend what their eyes and ears told them. In those moments, she made her way unhindered across the restaurant, out the door, and down the stairs.

A short time later, she found the hackney she’d ordered to wait for her, and told the driver to take her to the nearest police station.

There, she asked for the officer in charge. She turned over the pistol and told what she had done. The officer did not believe her. He sent two
gendarmes
to Antoine’s, and gave her a glass of wine. The men returned an hour later, with copious notes they’d taken at the scene of the crime, and the Comte d’Esmond.

Esmond had come to release her, he said. It was all a misunderstanding, and accident. The Marquess of Dain’s wound was not mortal. A scratch, that was all. He would not bring charges against Mademoiselle Trent.

Naturally not, Jessica thought. He would lose a court battle against her. This was Paris, after all.

“Then I shall bring charges against myself,” she said, chin high. “And you may tell your friend—”

“Mademoiselle, I shall be honored to convey any message you wish,” Esmond said smoothly. “But you will communicate more comfortably in my carriage, I think.”

“Certainly not,” she said. “I insist upon being jailed, for my own protection, so that he can’t kill me to keep me quiet. Because, monsieur, that is the only way
anyone
is going to keep me quiet.”

She turned to the officer in charge. “I shall be happy to write a full and detailed confession for you. I have nothing to hide. I shall be delighted to speak with the reporters who will no doubt be mobbing the place in the next half hour.”

“Mademoiselle, I am sure the matter can be settled to your satisfaction,” said Esmond. “But I recommend you let your temper cool before you speak to anyone.”

“Very wise,” said the officer in charge. “You are agitated. It is understandable. An affair of the heart.”

“Quite,” she said, meeting Esmond’s enigmatic blue gaze. “A crime of passion.”

“Yes, mademoiselle, as everyone will deduce,” said Esmond. “If the police do not release you immediately, there will be more than reporters storming the place. All of Paris will rise up to rescue you, and the city will be plunged into riot. You do not wish innocent people to be killed on your account, I am sure.”

There was a clamor outside—the first contingent of reporters, she guessed. She drew out the moment, letting tension build in the room.

Then she shrugged. “Very well. I shall go home. For the sake of the endangered innocents.”

By midmorning, the Comte d’Esmond was with Dain, who lay upon a sofa in the library.

The wound was nothing, Dain was sure. He’d scarcely felt it. The bullet had gone clean through. Though his arm had bled a great deal, Dain was used to the sight of blood, including his own, and should not have swooned.

But he had, several times, and each time he’d come to, he’d felt hotter. A physician had come and examined the wound and treated it and bandaged it and told Dain he was very lucky.

It was clean. No bones had been shattered. Muscle and nerve damage was negligibly minor. There was no danger of infection.

Dain should not, therefore, be feverish, but he was. First his arm burned, then his shoulder and neck caught fire. Now his head was ablaze.

Amid this internal hellfire, he heard Esmond’s voice, smooth and soothing as always.

“She knows,
naturellement
, that no jury in France would convict her,” said Esmond. “Here, it is easier to pass a camel through the eye of a needle than to convict a beautiful woman of any crime which appears to be in any way connected to
l’amour
.”

“Of course she knows.” Dain gritted out the words. “Just as I know she didn’t do it in the heat of the moment. Did you see her hand? Not a hint of trembling. Cold and steady as you please. She was not in a mindless rage. She knew precisely what she was doing.”

“She knows very well what she is doing,” Esmond agreed. “Shooting you was only the beginning. She means to make a spectacle of you. I am to tell you that she will make public—in the courtroom if she can get the trial she insists upon, or in the papers if she cannot—every detail of the episode. She says she will repeat all you said to her and describe in full detail everything you did.”

“In other words, she’ll exaggerate and twist words to her purpose,” said Dain, angrily aware that all she had to utter was the truth. And that, in the eyes of the world, would reduce Lord Beelze-bub to a lovesick, panting, groaning, sweating schoolboy. His friends would howl with laughter at his mawkish outpourings, even the Italian.

She would remember what the words sounded like—she was adept in Latin, wasn’t she?—and do an apt imitation, because she was quick and clever…and vengeful. Then all his mortifying secrets, dreams, fantasies, would be translated into French and English—and soon, every other language known to humankind. The words would be printed in bubbles over his head in printshop caricatures. Farces of the episode would be enacted upon the stage.

That was merely a fraction of what he’d face, Dain knew.

He had only to recollect how the press had pilloried Byron a dozen years earlier—and the poet had been a model of social rectitude compared to the Marquess of Dain. Furthermore, Byron had not been obscenely wealthy, terrifyingly big and ugly, and infuriatingly powerful.

The bigger they are, the harder the fall. And the better the world liked seeing them fall.

Dain understood the way of the world very well. He could see plainly enough what the future held. Miss Jessica Trent saw, too, undoubtedly. That was why she hadn’t killed him. She wanted to make sure he suffered the torments of hell while he lived.

She knew he would suffer, because she had struck in the only place where he could be hurt: his pride.

And if he couldn’t endure it—which she knew, of course, he couldn’t—she’d get her satisfaction in private, no doubt. She would make him
crawl
.

She had him exactly where she wanted him, the she-devil.

Amid the hellfire raging over half his body, his head began to pound. “I’d better deal with her directly,” he said. His tongue was thick, slurring the words. “Negotiate. Tell her…” He swallowed. His throat burned, too. “Terms. Tell her…”

He shut his eyes and searched his throbbing, roiling mind for words, but they wouldn’t come. His head was a red-hot mound of metal a hellish blacksmith was hammering upon, pounding intellect, thought, into nothingness. He heard Esmond’s voice, very far away, but couldn’t make sense of the words. Then the satanic hammer struck one shattering blow, and knocked Dain into oblivion.

Consumed by the feverish illness he shouldn’t have had, Dain drifted in and out of consciousness for most of the next four days.

On the morning of the fifth day, he woke fully, and more or less recovered. That was to say, the fire and throbbing were gone. His left arm refused to move, though. It dangled uselessly at his side. There was feeling in it, but he couldn’t make it do anything.

The physician returned, examined, made wise noises, and shook his head. “I can find nothing wrong,” he said.

He summoned a colleague, who also found nothing wrong, and summoned another, with the same result.

By late afternoon, Dain had seen eight medical men, all of whom told him the same thing. By then, Dain was beside himself. He had been poked and questioned and muttered over for most of the day, and spent a great deal of money on physicians’ fees to no purpose.

To cap it off, a law clerk arrived minutes after the last quack left. Herbert delivered the message the clerk had brought just as Dain was attempting to pour himself a glass of wine. His eye upon the note on the silver salver, Dain missed the glass, and splattered wine on his dressing gown, slippers, and the Oriental carpet.

He hurled imprecations, as well as the salver, at Herbert’s head, then stormed out of the drawing room and on to his own room, where he worked himself into a fury trying to unseal and unfold the note with one hand. By then, he was so enraged, he could scarcely see straight.

There was little enough to see. According to the note, Mr. Andrew Herriard wished to meet with His Lordship’s solicitor on behalf of Miss Jessica Trent.

Lord Dain’s insides turned to lead.

Andrew Herriard was a famous London solicitor with an extensive clientele of powerful expatriates in Paris. He was also a pillar of rectitude—incorruptible, loyal, and indefatigable in serving his clients. Lord Dain was aware, as were a great many people, that beneath the lawyer’s saintly exterior loomed a steel trap with jaws and teeth a shark would envy. The trap was reserved primarily for men, because Mr. Andrew Herriard was a gallant knight in the service of the weaker sex.

It didn’t matter to the solicitor that the law was squarely on the side of male prerogative, and that a woman, to all intents and purposes, had no rights under that law and nothing she could call her own, including her offspring.

Herriard created the rights he believed women were entitled to—and got away with it. Even Francis Beaumont, devious swine that he was, could not touch the tenth part of a farthing of his wife’s income, thanks to Herriard.

This was because Herriard’s approach, when a fellow balked at outrageous demands, was to subject the poor sod to an endless stream of barristers and petty litigation, until the sod caved in from sheer exhaustion, was ruined by legal fees, or was carried, screaming, to a lunatic asylum.

Miss Trent, in short, was not only going to make Lord Dain crawl, but she would have Herriard do the dirty work for her, and have it all done legally, with not a loophole for Dain to wriggle out of.

“There is no animal more invincible than a woman,” Aristophanes had said, “nor fire either, nor any wildcat so ruthless.”

Ruthless. Vicious.
Fiendish
.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” Dain muttered. “Not via go-betweens, you demon spawn.” He wadded the note into a tight ball and hurled it at the grate. Then he stomped to his writing desk, grabbed a sheet of notepaper, scrawled an answer, and shouted for his valet.

In his note to Mr. Herriard, Dain had declared that he would meet with Miss Trent at seven o’clock that evening at her brother’s house. He would not, as Herriard had requested, send his solicitor to meet with hers, because the Marquess of Dain had no intention, he wrote, “of being sworn, signed, and bled dry by
proxy
.” If Miss Trent had terms to dictate, she could bloody well do it in person. If that didn’t suit, she was welcome to send her brother to Dain, who would be happy to settle the matter at twenty paces—with
both
combatants armed this time.

Given the last suggestion, Jessica decided it would be best if Bertie spent the evening else-where. He still had no idea what had happened.

She had returned from the police station to find her brother suffering painful consequences of his alcohol consumption during Lady Wallingdon’s ball. His constitution weakened by months of dissipation, he had succumbed to a violent dyspepsia, and had not left his bed until teatime yesterday.

Even in the best of circumstances, his brain functions were unreliable. At present, the effort to comprehend Dain’s anomalous behavior might trigger a relapse, if not apoplexy. Equally important, Jessica dared not risk Bertie’s bumbling after Dain with the misguided idea of avenging her honor.

Genevieve had agreed. She had, accordingly, taken Bertie to dine with her at the Duc d’Abonville’s. The duc could be relied upon to hold his tongue. It was he, after all, who’d advised Jessica to hold hers until she spoke with a lawyer.

It was also the duc who was paying Mr. Herriard’s fee. If Jessica had not agreed to let him do so, Abonville would have called Dain out himself. That offer had told Jessica all she needed to know about the French nobleman’s feelings about Genevieve.

At seven o’clock, therefore, Bertie was safely out of the way. Only Mr. Herriard was with Jessica in the drawing room. They were standing before a table upon which a neat pile of documents lay when Dain stalked in.

He swept Herriard one contemptuous glance, then bent his sardonic obsidian gaze upon Jessica. “Madam,” he said, with a short nod.

“My lord,” she said, with a shorter one.

“That takes care of the social niceties,” he said. “You may proceed to the extortion.”

Mr. Herriard’s lips set in a thin line, but he said nothing.

He took up the papers from the table and gave them to Dain, who moved across the room to a window. He set the papers upon the wide sill, took up the topmost one, and leisurely read it. When he was done, he put it down and took up the next.

Minutes ticked by. Jessica waited, growing edgier with each passing moment.

Finally, nearly a half hour later, Dain looked up from the documents it should have taken him a fraction of that time to comprehend.

“I wondered how you meant to play it,” he told Herriard. “If we spare ourselves the legalisms and Latinisms, what it boils down to is a defamation suit—if I don’t agree to settle the matter privately, according to your exorbitant terms.”

“The words you uttered in the hearing of six other parties could be construed in only one way, my lord,” said Herriard. “With those words, you destroyed my client’s social and financial credit. You have made it impossible for her to wed or earn a respectable independent livelihood. You have made her an outcast from the society to which she was bred and properly belongs. She will be obliged, therefore, to live in exile from her friends and loved ones. She must build a new life.”

“And I’m to pay for it, I see,” said Dain. “Settle all of her brother’s debts, amounting to six thou sand pounds.” He glanced over the pages. “I am to support her to the tune of two thousand per annum and…ah, yes. There was something about securing and maintaining a place of residence.”