The Wild Marquis (3 page)

And that was a good thing, she told herself sternly. The Marquis of Chase was her ticket to acclaim as a powerful and respected bookseller. Being distracted by his undoubted physical appeal was a waste of time.

“Let’s go and look at something expensive,” she said.

Cain had heard those words before, and from women, but he doubted Mrs. Merton’s idea of a luxurious bauble had much sparkle to it. Fifteen minutes later he found himself seated on a hard chair in front of a green baize-covered table, staring at three ugly volumes.

“And what is so marvelous about these?” he asked.

She cast him a furious look. “Keep your voice down,” she muttered. “We don’t want everyone to hear.”

Since the room was packed, their chairs jammed against each other’s and their neighbors’, he couldn’t see how their conversation could be private. But every man appeared absorbed in the examination of books. Not reading, merely looking at them. Some leafed through volumes a page at a time in a measured rhythm, too fast to take in even a word or two from each page.

It all seemed very strange to Cain, who’d spent much of the past half-dozen years backstage in Lon
don’s theaters. The studious solemnity of these book buyers couldn’t have presented a greater contrast to the bright costumes and cosmetics, the gaudy make-believe of thespian life. Oddest of all was the lack of females. His companion was the only woman in the whole place.

The book in front of them was bound in dirty brown leather. With a reverent air Mrs. Merton opened the dull brass clasp that held the covers closed and turned to the first page, careful not to crack the spine.

“What is this?” he asked.

“
The Chronicles of England
, printed in 1480 by William Caxton, the first English printer.” From the veneration in her voice he was supposed to be impressed.

“I can’t read it. It’s in gothic type.”

“You’re not supposed to read it.” She looked at him with droll astonishment.

“It’s a book. Books are meant to be read.”

She raised a hand as though to shield it from his impertinent gaze. “It’s far too precious to read.” Surprise turned to disbelief. “You do know who Caxton was?”

As it happened he did, but he preferred to tease her. “I do now. A very important man who printed very ugly books.”

“Perhaps Caxtons aren’t for you. You are more interested in literature than pure historical significance. What kind of book do you like to read?”

“I may only have time for one or two a year, but I do enjoy the theater. What about Shakespeare?”

“Are you sure? Tarleton’s collection features many less common playwrights.”

“Less common because less good, I imagine. Why not stick with the best?”

“Of course.” It might be his imagination but he didn’t think so. The enthusiasm dropped from her voice. She held up a hand to summon a porter. “Please bring us the folios.”

Up to that moment Cain had played along with Mrs. Merton’s game of deceiving spies about his true goal at the auction. He was also amused by her efforts to persuade him to other purchases. But the name Shakespeare affected her and he was curious to know why. If he had to spend the day in this dreary place, he might as well have a little mystery to solve.

She seemed calm enough while she explained that the four large volumes bound in red leather were the first collected editions of Shakespeare’s plays, the earliest printed in 1623, only a few years after the bard’s death.

“They belonged to Sir John Vanbrugh and disappeared after his death. Tarleton managed to track them down.”

“How did he do that?” A prickle of excitement crept up Cain’s spine.

“He was clever that way.” Her pretty Cupid’s bow mouth compressed into a pout. Mrs. Merton wasn’t telling him everything she knew. He needed to pursue this line of inquiry, though perhaps not in the middle of a crowded room.

He picked up the First Folio. A spasmodic flutter of her hands suggested she was terrified he’d drop the precious object. Just to provoke a reaction he jounced
it up and down in one hand. “It’s heavy, rather too big for reading in bed. And the print is small. I’d have to hold a candle to assist my poor eyesight and I might spill wax on it.”

He thought she’d snatch the book away but she managed to restrain the impulse. Mrs. Merton wouldn’t make a good cardplayer. Though she tried to look inscrutable, her emotions were written on her face and she appeared to undergo an internal struggle. Then her eyes, which he’d dismissed as hazel but now noticed were an attractive moss green, gleamed with enthusiasm.

“Would you consider buying the folios?” Eagerly calculating that commission, no doubt.

“I might. But if I’m not allowed to read them, could you explain why I want them?”

“The First Folio is the first edition of many of Shakespeare’s plays. Scholars find it important because they are used to establish the correct text.”

Launched into her subject, she fairly quivered with eagerness, incidentally rubbing her thigh against his in an enjoyable manner.

“Poor old Shakespeare,” he said, ousting an enticing vision of what might be so thoroughly hidden beneath the yards of black material. “So his works weren’t published during his life?”

She hesitated before answering. “Less than two dozen of the thirty-eight. They were printed in individual volumes known as quartos.” Her voice had changed again. It seemed almost deliberately flat, in marked contrast to the fervor with which she’d described other books.

“Do you have any of these quartos?” he asked the hovering porter.

A few minutes later a pile of squarish, slim volumes, perhaps a dozen in all, were deposited in front of them. And there was no mistaking Mrs. Merton’s displeasure.

Juliana cursed silently. Resisting her efforts to steer him in a more convenient direction, Lord Chase had, just like a man, unerringly settled on the books she wanted for herself. She did her best to point out their undesirable features.

“Many of them were copied from promptbooks, or even taken down by members of the audience. It means the texts are often inaccurate.” She selected a volume from the center of the pile. “This is a bad quarto of
Hamlet
.”

Chase growled, drawing curious glances from their neighbors. “Bad Quarto. Down, sir,” he said.

She frowned at him.

“Sorry,” he said, “but it sounds like a name for a dog. What’s so bad about it, anyway?”

“Did you ever hear the line ‘To be, or not to be, I there’s the point’?”

“Intriguing. Are there any good ones? What about…that one?” he asked.

The man had the eye of a magpie, for he’d honed in on the volume in the brightest binding. She’d always loved the soft green calf that covered her very favorite book.

Her hands shook a little as, for the first time in years, she opened the front cover to reveal a penciled signature. “Cassandra Fitterbourne, 1793.” The sight
of it had never failed to make her heart leap. Without thinking she traced her forefinger under the name.

“Who was Cassandra Fitterbourne?” Chase asked. The alert tone of his voice told her she’d roused his curiosity. Her client wasn’t as foolish as he liked to pretend.

“A former owner, I suppose,” she replied, striving for nonchalance.

He gave her a look that suggested he wasn’t entirely satisfied with her answer, then turned back to the book.

“What does that mean?” He indicated the annotation beneath the signature: “xx/je/t.”

“It’s a price. Booksellers and collectors often use a code to record what they paid for a book.”

“How much?”

“I don’t know the code.” That at least was true.

“What play is it?” Chase picked up the book and flipped through the binder’s blanks to the title page. “
An excellent conceited Tragedie of Romeo and Iuliet
,” he read. “I think I’ll buy it.”

Juliana couldn’t stand it. She snatched away the volume and clasped it to her breast. “Don’t you dare!” She realized she’d raised her voice, and reduced it again to a furious whisper. “You shouldn’t be allowed to buy books if you don’t treat them well. These are important and precious volumes. Can’t you take anything seriously?”

The marquis didn’t respond at once. A certain hardening about his mouth, bleak eyes scanning the room, told her he was displeased. This was no way to treat an important customer. Joseph would never have
been so foolish. Carelessly she’d let her disdain show and annoyed him.

“My lord,” she said, touching his sleeve to reclaim his attention. “I apologize…”

He looked back at her, and in a mercurial switch his eyes seemed to laugh.

“No apology needed,” he assured her. “I don’t pretend to be a serious man but I would like to hear what you have to say about Shakespeare. I find myself intrigued by the previous owners of the books. Do you suppose Cassandra Fitterbourne owned the
Romeo and Juliet
because she was herself a ‘star-cross’d’ lover’?”

“An agreeable speculation,” she replied with as much composure as she could muster. Not only had her client shown a surprising knowledge of Shakespeare, he’d also asked the question about Cassandra Fitterbourne that Juliana would like to have answered for herself.

She feared she hadn’t succeeded in deflecting Chase’s attention from the Shakespeares. Well, he couldn’t have them. They were hers by every moral right. He could have the folios, but she wasn’t going to let him get his careless hands on the quartos, especially Cassandra’s
Romeo and Juliet
.

Juliana considered what she knew of Lord Chase’s tastes. He had a showy red carriage with velvet seats; a scorn for important books in dull bindings; and a reputation as a rakehell. She had his measure and knew just the book for him: a French edition of Aretino’s
Dialogues
. Bound in red morocco gilt. With illustrations. Let him get one look at that bawdy classic and he’d forget all about her humble quartos.

“I’ve thought of another book that will interest you, my lord.” She looked around for a porter and found none available. “Please wait while I fetch it.”

Left alone at the table, Cain pondered Mrs. Merton’s reluctance to let him buy the Shakespeares. He examined each volume, looking for Cassandra Fitterbourne’s signature. Several of the volumes were inscribed with the initials “G.F.” but apparently only
Romeo and Juliet
had belonged to the lovely Cassandra.

Lovely? She was most likely a prim spinster of a literary bent.

Sebastian Iverley took the next seat and muttered a distracted, though civil greeting. Either the bespectacled bookworm was unaware of Cain’s unsavory reputation, or he didn’t care. Cain subjected him to a rapid assessment. Iverley might dislike women, but Cain wasn’t receiving any of the signals occasionally sent him by men of different tastes.

“Tell me, Iverley,” he asked. “Do you know of a book collector named Fitterbourne? Cassandra Fitterbourne?”

Iverley frowned. “Not Cassandra. George. From Wiltshire. Died three or four years ago. Tarleton bought his collection.”

“Could Cassandra have been his wife? Or perhaps a daughter?”

“I never heard of any wife or daughter,” Iverley replied with a note of approval, as though any man should be congratulated on the lack of female appendages. “And women don’t make good book collectors.”

Iverley was a fool. Cain knew women’s brains worked just as well as men’s, merely in a different manner, one he understood and appreciated. During the past hour he’d seen enough of Mrs. Merton to judge that she knew her subject well.

She certainly knew a good deal about Sir Thomas Tarleton, which was after all the whole point of his presence here. He would enjoy getting the information out of her, since she was quite lovely herself and, he was beginning to suspect, far from prim.

He relaxed in his seat and watched her thrust her way with single-minded determination through the crowd of men, to whom she was, apparently, invisible. Were they all blind? Speaking for himself, he found the view of her excessively well-formed derrière, swaying with unintended lure, most enjoyable. And appreciated the irony that he had managed to engage the only female bookseller in London.

J
uliana was headed for a red morocco binding behind the doors of a glass-fronted bookcase when a soberly dressed gentleman impeded her approach.

“Mrs. Merton?”

“Mr. Gilbert,” Juliana replied with a nod. She’d never exchanged more than a few words with him, an occasional browser in her shop. But she had the deepest respect for his reputation. Only in his thirties, Matthew Gilbert was perhaps the premier rare bookseller in London. Although
bookseller
was too humdrum a word to define Gilbert’s position as adviser and confidant to the book-collecting nobility.

“I’m glad to meet you,” he said. “You had some interesting volumes of ecclesiastical history on your shelves. Nothing I wanted, but I wondered if you had any others.”

“I have a few other volumes from the same source in my back room. If you’d care to visit the shop I’d be glad to bring them out.”

“I have a customer who might be interested.”

Juliana was somewhat surprised. The books he’d
mentioned were among the last Joseph had acquired, on the fatal trip when he’d met his death. She’d almost given up hope of finding a suitable clergyman on whom to unload them.

Maybe one of Gilbert’s clients was a bishop.

“I shall call on you soon,” he said with a polite nod.

“It might be best to send word when you wish to see me. I shall spend much of the next few weeks in these rooms.”

“Of course. Where else would any successful bookseller be?”

Being so described by
Matthew Gilbert
put a smile on her face. But her good mood at rubbing shoulders with a major figure in her trade shattered when she asked the porter for the Aretino.

“I’m sorry, madam,” he said stiffly. “Ladies are not permitted to view the contents of this cabinet.”

“Why not?”

“It contains volumes of an unsuitable nature.”

She drew herself up to her full height of five feet, one inch and glared at him.

“I am not a lady. I am a bookseller. And I wish to see Aretino’s
Dialogues
.”

She spoke louder than intended. Every eye in the room rose from its bibliographic perusal and fixed on her.

Wonderful
. Most of the London book world, the men she was so anxious to impress, including Mr. Gilbert, had heard her demand a notorious work of erotic literature. She blushed to the roots of her hair.

Uncertain whether to retreat or stand her ground,
she rested for a moment, trying to summon the courage to argue her case, when she felt a light touch on her arm and a smoky voice in her ear.

“Why don’t you let me see to this, Mrs. Merton.”

The marquis had come to her rescue. She returned to her seat in mingled gratitude and resentment, with a touch of wry amusement at her own expense. For all her lectures she could hardly now accuse
him
of indiscretion.

Poor girl
, Cain thought as he waited for the now amenable porter to unlock the cabinet. He’d been watching, curious about what Mrs. Merton was up to, and felt a shadow of annoyance at seeing her smiling and curtsying to a man who looked as though he had a stick up his respectable arse. Irrationally, perhaps, he felt possessive of the little bookseller. She was supposed to be working for
him
. Then he heard her scandalous request echo around the almost silent room. He’d never been able to resist the urge to assist a woman in distress.

Tarquin Compton stood beside the same bookcase. Cain often encountered him in the haunts of the demimonde: green rooms, masquerades, entertainments hosted by fashionable courtesans. Unlike Chase, Compton was also welcome in every haunt of the beau monde, a darling of the ladies who craved his opinion in matters of taste and lauded his wit.

Cain had no reason to dislike Compton more than any other member of the
ton
that rejected him. Why should he care that the dandy exercised his wit at Cain’s expense, coining a series of stupid names for him? The Sinful Marquis (too obvious), the Unchaste
Marquis (a bad pun), the Meretricious Marquis (lamentable alliteration). Most recently Compton had reportedly called Cain the Feral Marquis, suggesting he’d been raised by wolves.

All these soubriquets referred, in apposition, to that of his saintly father. As usual Cain’s stomach roiled with acid at the mere thought of his sire.

“Interesting choice of book,” Compton said.

Seeking the hidden barb in Compton’s mild tone, Cain raised his head to meet the taller man squarely in the eye. “Then I’ll step aside and leave it to you, Compton. Let me recommend the thirty-five postures. You could use some lessons in performance, I suspect. I seem to recall Maria Johnson was under your protection until she found she preferred me.”

“I doubt it was my skills she found inferior. Rather the size of my purse.”

“And Belinda Beauchamp—not her real name, I fancy—left you after a week. Mm.” Cain put forefinger to his mouth in a mockery of concentrated thought. “Oh, yes, I believe she came to me. Without anything very flattering to say about her most recent lover. And I don’t believe she was referring to the size of his
purse
.”

“I defer to your knowledge of the ladies of the night, Chase, since you were all but born in a brothel.” Compton’s tone matched the disdain on his perfectly shaven hawkish face.

Cain adjusted his balance into a fighter’s stance. He could see the other man’s muscles tighten in preparation.

Compton looked down his nose in silence.

“You’re nothing but a hypocrite, Compton,” Cain said with a provocative grin. “But forgive me if I’m wrong and you sought these virtuous ladies only for the pleasure of their conversation.”

Peace hung in the balance as Compton hesitated, clearly less willing than Cain to cause a scandal. Cain tossed another stick on the fire. “And speaking of hypocrisy, what are you doing next to a cabinet full of ‘unsuitable books’?”

Cain prepared to dodge a punch but instead, to his great surprise, he was the recipient of a sheepish grin.

“You have a point,” Compton said. “It so happens that I collect, among other things, the kind of books found in this bookcase. But only those,” he added with a hint of mock piety on otherwise expressionless features, “of outstanding artistic merit. I can highly recommend the one you’re about to look at.”

The moment when every man in the room had raised his eyes at the sound of her voice had to number among the worst of Juliana’s life. Almost as infuriating was the fact that, as a woman, she was not permitted to show a valuable book to a client.

The marquis experienced no difficulty having it brought out for examination. He returned to their table with the red volume tucked under his arm and took his seat at her side.

She found his proximity disconcerting. Accustomed as she was to crowded viewing rooms and
cramped seating, the presence of her fellow bookmen never bothered her. Her attention, like theirs, was engaged by the assessment of fine bindings, the condition of engravings and fore edges, the steady rhythm of collating pages.

Even the odor of the occasional unwashed dealer dissipated in the familiar scent of book dust and old leather. But not Chase’s. An indefinable bouquet—cleanliness, a hint of tobacco mixed with some kind of pricey masculine unguent—assailed her nostrils. When his thigh, accidentally or not, rubbed against her own, she found it hard to concentrate.

It had been bad enough when the object of their examination was something as untitillating as a Caxton. But the Aretino. Good Lord, what a book!

She’d never actually seen an edition, merely knew of its repute—or ill repute. He placed the volume between them and opened the volume to the title page.

The Dialogues and Thirty-Five Postures
, after Aretino, she translated silently. Innocent enough, it appeared, until she discovered exactly what was meant by “postures.” She had no idea men and women could do such things.

She felt her cheeks grow hot. Was that rather plump and almost naked woman actually about to…?

She looked at the caption.
La femme embrasse le Dieu Priape ailé
. That meant embrace or kiss. She glanced back at the picture. Kiss in this case, definitely kiss. And the meaning of “the winged God Priapus” was all too obvious.

“It’s a nice large copy,” she remarked, trying to project dispassionate judgment.

“So I see.” Lord Chase’s voice was completely bland.

Hurriedly she turned a page. This time the man was doing the “kissing” and in an equally shocking place.

“Notice the freshness of the engraving,” she said. “A fine impression.”

“Yes indeed,” he murmured. “I can see he’s making a very fine impression.”

She shot him a look. His face showed nothing but perfect gravity, and she didn’t believe it for a minute.

She babbled on about the quality of the drawing, the rarity of the edition, the splendor of the binding, with little idea if she made sense. Every minute the book lay open before them she was aware of Chase, not as a book buyer but as a man. Every nerve prickled and the room seemed stifling.

Visions of herself doing some of those…things…with Lord Chase flashed through her mind. Heat bloomed in areas she never thought about and her breasts felt tight. She glanced down to make sure the hardening of her nipples wasn’t apparent through the fabric of her gown. The heavy mourning concealed her excitement but it also exacerbated her fever. She’d never been more relieved than when she reached the last page and closed the book.

“Thank you, Mrs. Merton. That was very educational.”

She muttered something, fairly sure that in this case the education had been all hers.

“If there’s nothing else you’d like to show me today,” he continued, “let me take you home.”

“Thank you, but I have a couple of errands to perform on the way. I shall walk.”

“It’s a cold day,” he coaxed.

Dear Lord, she hoped it was snowing. Then she would have a chance of cooling off.