A Man Above Reproach (7 page)

She glanced up and he smiled, bashfully, which was an odd emotion for him. Something about it pleased her and she returned the smile.

He was ruined.

“Bloody schoolboy,” Nicholas whispered, chuckling.

Elias kicked him under the table and he let out a little
oof
.

“Mind the stage show, Nicholas, for Sally will ask your opinion.”

Elias himself could not attend the stage show at all. He closed his eyes and let Josephine’s notes wash over him unaccompanied by images. He drained the remainder of his cognac. It was refilled soon enough after, then twenty minutes after that. How long could this show be? It was utterly boring to him, as girl after girl paraded in front of them. Interminable group numbers. Bawdy skits. At least the musical accompaniment was exquisite, though it was hard to hear over the unruly men.

He found that he was getting pleasantly drunk, which in turn made him feel more charitable about the cut direct he had received from that gorgeous creature. It was a misunderstanding. They would talk after she played, and he would be able to tell her that the ideas in her book had a certain clarity that he did not exactly disagree with and that he was not one of the “oblivious” nobility, as she had termed it. It was a damned good thing that no one seemed to patronize her bookstore. If another duke had read the book, the whole of her supply would be set on fire in the public square.

His eyes snapped open. What a feverish idiot he had been to not think of this before—Josephine had used her real name on her book. How was it that she used a careful pseudonym at the club but was so careless with her real reputation? She had been lucky up to that point, but it could not continue. The wrong person would happen upon the book; it was inevitable. Her bookstore would be in jeopardy for certain, her person as well, perhaps. The book was not just radical in its social implications; it was a condemnation of the entire upper echelon. What Josephine was doing was both dangerous and imprudent.

The music was reaching a crescendo, the finale being all of the girls dancing together in a haphazard manner. It did not look as if they had rehearsed long. Some tottered; some peeked at their companions to find their place in the steps. Elias set his glass down with heavy-lidded eyes. The good mood he had been cultivating was rent to shreds on the
thought of Josephine being in peril. There would be no flirting after the show. There would be a serious conversation, whether she liked it or not.

The show ended with the girls dancing off of the stage and into the crowd, picking their favorite men or being plucked away by a greedy eye. It was no time at all before Sally and Thackeray found each other. Just as Elias was about to get up, a painted face and bejeweled dress landed in his lap.

“Where are you off to, Duke?” purred the woman, her eyes lined thick with kohl. “The bluestocking told me earlier that you would be in need of company this evening. Perhaps I could provide you with some comfort?”

Elias twisted to see the piano. Blast. She was gone, with the wine too, that minx. How could she have disappeared without his knowledge? He had not been able to keep his eyes off of her for much of the night.

The girl in his lap was savvy. She followed his gaze to the piano and then took his chin in her hand to turn his eyes back.

“The piano player deserves a break after such a fine performance, wouldn’t you say, Your Grace?” She put her arms around his neck, slinky and seductive. “But I can accommodate your desires, darling.”

Elias shifted under her with discomfort. She was indeed pretty, but every word out of her mouth made him think of
On Society’s Ills and the Real Price of Prostitution
. Josephine had written with startling lucidity on the ways that women fooled themselves when they were forced to sell their bodies to men and their limited income alternatives. The calculated breath on his ear, the way this woman’s leg wrapped around the chair, even the smell of her hair… it no longer seemed to be the simple charm of a lady. It was calculated for survival. He cleared his throat.

“I have unfinished business with the musician.”

“Your money would be spent more wisely elsewhere, you know,” she pouted.

He patted her hand chastely. “You are amiable, my dear, but you cannot possibly have what I want.”

“Are you certain?” Two bats of her eyelashes.

“Yes. Unless…” Elias felt a light go on in his brain, such that it almost seemed visible. “Unless you know where she would go if she wanted to hide.”

She looked away, unsure.

“I will pay for your trouble.”

Her close-mouthed smile was an answer. Elias stopped to speak with Sally, as he had an important question for her. Then, it was off to find his reckless bluestocking.

Behind the ratty rooms in which Mother Superior’s girls earned their bread was a small courtyard, lit only by the slivers of moonlight leaking in from an adjacent alleyway. Mother had allowed it to fall into disrepair, but Josephine never minded the fact that it ran wild. Ambitious vines escaped over the walls, so unlike most of the girls inside. Unidentified greenery dotted the stones with no one to weed it out. The only noises were occasional exaggerated moaning from the rooms and vagrants rummaging behind the building.

No one came back here except her, and she was glad of it.

Josephine lit a small cigar from a flickering candlestick, which promptly guttered out. She exhaled and let herself slump against the wall, not caring about the dew on the foliage. The glass of wine, which was her reward for tolerating the duke, stung the back of her throat perfectly. For a moment, she could forget.

“Bollocks,” she sighed to herself.

“Smoking, swearing,” said a voice from the entryway. “One would not think there was a lady back here.”

An unmistakable voice.

Josephine leaned her head back against the wall in frustration.

“Go back to Ashworth Hall, Lennox. There is much in need of your attention and none of it involves being in a brothel.”

“You have done your research. Do you know more about me than I know about you, love?”

He hovered, not coming nearer. It was unnerving and evasive, but from what she did know of him, he was a decisive and immovable man. Sally had asked around that afternoon, quizzing the thin flock of customers about the Duke of Lennox.

“As much as I could.”

This was not much, but he did not need to know that. There had been no time and the most the people of Cheapside knew about Lennox was that no one really knew him. All that Sally had been able to glean was the previous duke had recently passed and his heir, Elias Addison, prowled the estate, rifling through his predecessor’s papers and barely sleeping. One of the ladies, a street flower girl, was ardent about the one time she had seen him in a carriage—“He is like a gothic hero, haunted and all!” His hooded eyes alone could have told her that. Society finds him intimidating and taciturn, said the lovely modiste from the end of the block. The gossip had not yielded much more than Josephine could have guessed within the first two minutes of meeting Lennox.

“I like your book,” he said from the dark.

“Like?”

“Like, yes. Of course, it has its problems.”

“Oh?”

“Your editor is hasty. Your publisher is untested.”

“Good show. You have it all figured out.” She put the cigar between her fingers and flicked it, as cheeky as she could muster under his scrutiny. “Take it to the floor of Parliament, won’t you?”

“I would never. You hold yourself like a sailor, and I admit that I am frightened of your wrath.”

There was a smile coloring his voice as he moved to lean beside her. He shed his mask and she thought he must have been aware that he placed himself in the most flattering spot of moonlight. It had to be calculated, this arrangement of his myriad attributes. The splash of light caught the angles of his cheekbones, the arch of his brows, threw shadows over them, loved them. The lighter streaks of his brown hair glowed, glinted, and reflected off of the stones. She felt sick but not lovesick. Revolted. As Salieri must have felt toward Mozart—this man had been given gifts that he did not deserve and could never live up to.

“Biographical information on the author of the book is sparse,” he continued, as if he had not just surrounded himself with a halo of unearthliness. “The leaf says that Josephine Grant lives in Cheapside and lists the address of your store. Why in God’s name would you not use an alias, Miss Grant?”

Elias made no move toward her. There was no seduction in his gaze. The answer to his question, that she
was
using an alias, was so simple that she could only guffaw, which she covered by swallowing the rest of her wine for fortification.

Even Sally, her dearest friend, didn’t know that she lived her life under a false identity. She had given up any claim to peerage when her father died and she assumed the name Josephine Grant so that she could run the Paper Garden. She even had letters mailed from Scotland to her cousins, telling of her quiet life. Her remaining relatives still lived in Staffordshire and probably did not think about her much, except lingering embarrassment over the reprehensible behavior of her father.

“You could have at least published under BB,” he continued. “It might have been a wonderful means of advertisement. If you let word slip out that the exotic and mysterious Bawdy Bluestocking of the Sleeping Dove had written a protest paper against prostitution and poverty, you would have all the footmen of all the nobility sent to the Paper Garden to buy your book. As it stands, I’ve just spoken to your girl Sally and reserved purchase of every remaining copy for myself, so that I may protect the real woman behind that grandiose mask. You’ve been foolish.”

He was not wrong, but she could very well hie to Scotland with no one the wiser if Josephine Grant was ever exposed. Her wine glass was quite empty. She examined it, a bit of the maroon color still clinging stubbornly to the sides.

“You do not intimidate me, Lennox.”

“Elias, for the last time. I might think you would thank me.”

“Oh, yes!” She made an exaggerated bow, flinging herself off the wall. “Thank goodness a duke came to save me! I was not managing perfectly well on my own!”

“You are uncommonly sensitive for such a social radical.”

He shifted to match her eye line.

“Is it our gender difference? If I was a woman, would you react this way?” he mused. “What if it was a duchess that had purchased your inventory under the guise of concern for your person?”

“
Your
duchess?” She could not disguise the venom in her voice. Enough that he was unreasonably beautiful, enough that he was quick… he was still an irredeemable fop who was shopping for a mistress to supplement his aged matron of a wife.

“My duchess?” he laughed. “My duchess would never do such a thing. My duchess has not even read Austen.”

“Not yet. She bought some today. And I appreciate the patronage.” She spat out the sentence, and it burned on the way. She did need the money, no matter the source.

Josephine made sure she had all of her belongings safely tucked in her reticule, setting the wine glass on the ground without a thought. She even thought of herself inwardly as Josephine now. She had not thought of her upbringing for years. Still, she was sure that she knew enough about society to know that she could not play this game with a duke. Before her mother snatched her away to Scotland, she had completed all the requirements of an accomplished debutante. She could embroider, she could play the pianoforte, she retained a smattering of French, and she could waltz. She was proficient in reading aloud by a fire, and she could curtsey with the best of them. She simply never thought of it any more. She had made the decision to leave society and stuck to it. It was an unwelcome memory that the duke had brought with him, a phantom behind his back all the time.

“You are a classically trained pianist. That book was written by an educated woman. Yet, you are not in
Debrett’s
,” he said, referring to the tome that listed each member of the peerage. “How would one find out which guardian to inform that his charge was spending her nights in an establishment full of Cyprians?”

“Is that a threat?” she scoffed. She felt like her old self then, facing him fully instead of scurrying away like a scared mouse. The nobility never took you seriously if you shirked. Even her irredeemable father would not come out of a confrontation with his head down. “I am long past guardianship.”

“It is just a question.”

He may as well have shrugged instead of spoken.

“My father was titled, but my debut was never a priority. My parents were living separately by the time I was seventeen. My mother and I spent some time in Scotland.” She decided she would not lie. This
serious man had become even more serious, and he was already digging around too much. It would also not do to give him too much information, so she walked a fine line in satisfying his curiosity. “She died when I was twenty, he when I was twenty-two, and I found out that the Paper Garden was the only thing available to me from my father’s holdings. I am now twenty-seven, a spinster bookseller. I could not be a governess; I was never good with children. I long ago abandoned hope of an advantageous marriage, on the shelf, as they say. Enough biographical information for you?”