One Night with a Rake (Regency Rakes) (2 page)

Maybe it was better this way. If his heart shut down completely, it would be easier to do what he must.

“I said I’d do it and I will,” Nathaniel said testily. “Now leave me be.”

“Good. That’s all I wanted to hear.” Alcock turned to go. “Oh, my sources tell me the lady is paying a visit at a house in Covent Garden this morning. Unsavory place, what? But it seems Lady Georgette is a bit of a crusading prig. Out to save the world. Perhaps you’d do well to track her down before she gets into trouble on her own.”

Nathaniel grunted, leaving it to Mr. Alcock to decide if the sound constituted agreement. Actually it was simple surprise. The house he’d won from Gobberd that morning was in the same unsavory neighborhood.

Fate, it seemed, had a sense of humor.

He waited till the man’s retreating footsteps vanished completely. Then Nate knelt next to Anne’s grave. He wished he’d thought to bring flowers. She’d always loved them.

For a moment he imagined her as he’d seen her for the last time, arms full of irises to arrange in a crystal vase. Fresh-cheeked, eyes bright, brimming with health and such innocence, Anne was sweet as the armful of blooms she carried.

The memory of his first love caused his chest to constrict painfully.

There it was finally. A genuine feeling. Like the fellow who’d stumbled into White’s that morning, Nathaniel was still alive.

At times, there was reason for doubt.

Merely forcing air in and out of one’s lungs didn’t constitute living. Even when Nate buried himself in hedonistic pleasures, he rarely felt that rush of guilty exhilaration sinning was supposed to deliver. A part of him watched from outside his body and wondered if his soul had already died and was merely waiting for the rest of him to cease to function.

Nothing would be gained by further stalling. He stood upright. “I won’t be back for a while, dearest. Maybe never. I doubt you’d want me here in any case,” he told Anne. “You see, I have to seduce your sister.”

The Marquis of Yorkingham’s barouche rattled through Covent Garden. It was the only conveyance stirring except the night-soil wagon which was making its rounds and accepting pungent offerings. From her perch on the forward facing squab of the barouche, Lady Georgette peered through the opening in the velvet curtain at the slatternly houses. Their shuttered windows reminded her of half-closed eyes, as if they, like their occupants, were done in by the previous night’s debauchery and needed their beauty sleep.

No Covent Garden streetwalkers were about, so far as she could tell, but Georgette could picture them. Imagining things was something in which she’d always excelled, so it was no stretch for her to visualize the piteous creatures wandering in desperation as they plied their trade on these narrow streets.

Georgette shivered a bit but was careful not to let Mercy, her maid, see that the neighborhood distressed her. If she lost courage now, she’d be mortally ashamed of herself. She was the daughter of a marquis. It was her duty to help those less fortunate than she, no matter where they might live.

Her carriage clattered to a halt on the uneven cobbles. Like Georgette, it was as out of place in this spotty neighborhood as a diamond in a pig’s snout.

“Beggin’ yer pardon, milady, but are ye certain sure ye wish to be here?” Reuben Darling, her footman, handed Georgette down from the elegant equipage. A concerned frown marred his handsome face. Footmen were hired for their height and pleasing features, and Reuben didn’t disappoint on either score, but he’d never demonstrated an overabundance of good sense.

Until now.

“I don’t like the looks of the place,” he said. “Not by half, I don’t.”

“He’s right for once,” Mercy chimed in.

Georgette’s lady’s maid clambered down from the carriage without waiting for Reuben’s assistance. In fact, she often made a point of ignoring him completely, which only made poor Reuben even more anxious to capture Mercy’s notice.

“Let us take ye home, yer ladyship, and Mr. Darling and me’ll come back and see to things here,” Mercy said. “Perhaps he can make himself useful for once instead of being just what ye might call ornamental.”

“Too right.” Reuben beamed at being included in Mercy’s plans.

When Georgette first noticed the footman’s growing attachment to her lady’s maid, she was mildly amused, but now she often pitied Reuben’s bungling attempts to win Mercy’s favor.

Mercy was much less amused by them. She considered him “dumb as a bag o’ feathers” and didn’t mind saying so.

Often.

“If ye won’t listen to reason, ye’ll have to walk a bit then,” Mercy said. The barouche wouldn’t fit down the narrow lane where the house that was their ultimate destination was located. This sordid corner was the closest the driver could manage. “I fear for your slippers, milady.”

“Nonsense. Better to fear for the women trapped here.” Georgette straightened her spine. She wasn’t about to let a little dinginess scare her away. “We’re here to find your friend, Mercy. I won’t leave until I’ve seen her and given her an opportunity to come with us.”

“As ye wish. It’s powerful kind of ye too, but it may be for naught.” Mercy shrugged and started to lead the way down the constricted lane. “Vesta’s been known to change her mind on things. Don’t ye be surprised if she don’t want to go.”

“Why ever not? I thought you said she wanted a different life.” Georgette waved her footman back when he made to follow them. “Oh, no, Mr. Darling, we’ll be fine. Wait here with the carriage. I’ve a feeling the horses are in more danger than we.”

In a neighborhood like this, meat in the stewpot was an unheard of luxury.

“If you’re sure, milady.”

“I’m sure. The day this Englishwoman fears to walk down a London street in broad daylight hasn’t dawned,” Georgette said with more bravado than she felt. She skittered after Mercy down the twisty alley named Lackaday Lane.

“Sing out if there’s trouble, then,” Reuben called after them.

The way Georgette’s heart thumped against her ribs, she was certain she could trill out a high C if necessary. She doubted the sun ever showed its face in this cramped lane. Even a slender beam of light would have to fight its way in, given the way the structures teetered toward each other. Eternal cold slid its icy fingers down her collar, slipped indecently under her hem, and up her silk-stockinged legs.

“Mind your skirts,” Mercy called over her shoulder.

Georgette’s nose crinkled at the whiff of an acrid odor. A rivulet of yellowish slime, the source of the stench, trickled down the center of the lane. She held her skirts bunched in one hand to avoid brushing them through it. Mercy was right to fear for her slippers. There’d be no hope for her kid soles after this.

Mercy looked back and shot her an encouraging grin.

“The chit is actually enjoying this,” Georgette muttered, feeling both anxious and foolish at the same time. Of course, Mercy had haunted holes like this one every day of her precarious life before she came to work for Georgette.

Her lady’s maid was Georgette’s first success, the first girl she’d managed to lift from a life of squalor in the burgeoning sex trade. It had taken several months of training, but Mercy learned the duties required of a lady’s maid.

She still wasn’t an ideal domestic servant in many respects. Her tongue was rather sharper than Georgette would have liked, and her speech was often peppered with mild vulgarities. Mercy was still secretive and standoffish with the rest of the help, and her needle skills were abysmal. But she was living proof that Georgette’s plan to help the working girls of London might bear fruit.

Albeit saucy, opinionated fruit.

“I don’t understand,” Georgette said. Even though she saw no one at any of the windows that looked down on the alley, she felt the pressure of eyes on her and lowered her voice. “Why wouldn’t your friend want to leave this place?”

“It ain’t the place so much she’d hate to leave, though you’ll see for yourself that looks can be deceiving. Inside, the house is much grander than it seems on the outside.”

Georgette was certain Mercy’s idea of what constituted “grand” was far different from hers.

“And the life here is lively,” Mercy went on. “There’s always food and drink aplenty, at least that’s how it were at Madam Bouchard’s house when I was there. She always says as gentlemen likes a girl with meat on her bones. And lying abed till noon is a grand way to pass the day.”

“I gather it’s the nights this Vesta will be anxious to leave.”

Georgette knew a few things about what passed between a man and woman, mostly from one summer at her father’s country estate when the mares were in season. She’d happened to be reading in the haymow, hiding with her book, because her mother discouraged her from spending too much time with her nose in one. When the grooms led in the wild-eyed stallion to cover a mare, Georgette peered down from her straw-covered perch and received an exciting, earthy education. Sometimes the stallion actually bit the mare till blood ran down her glossy withers and there was much whinnying and stamping involved.

If men were as violent as stallions in the act of procreation, she couldn’t understand why young women would submit to it for mere money. It was bad enough to have to do it once one was lawfully married.

“The nights ain’t so bad,” Mercy confided. “If a girl has regulars, they’re generally pretty good to her. Even brings her little presents sometimes.” She sighed. “Sometimes I think lifting me skirts was ever so much less trouble than being an honest woman.”

“Mercy!”

“I’m just speakin’ my mind, milady, just like ye tells me I should with ye. I’m not sayin’ as I wants to go back. But ye should know it weren’t the gentlemen what made me want to leave. Besides, being so poisonously good all the time is hard on a body,” Mercy said with a grimace. “I swear sometimes I get such an aching in me nethers…even that idiot Reuben starts lookin’ good to me.”

“Aching?” The way Mercy said the word made it seem like a pleasurable thing. Georgette had had a toothache once and it wasn’t at all pleasant. Certainly not what one would want to feel in one’s “nethers.”

“Sorry, milady. I keep forgettin’ they likes to keep your sort on the ignorant side of useful about such things.”

Ignorant?
Georgette spoke three languages. Fluently. She could do sums as well as her brother. She’d read Augustine’s
Confessions
in the original Latin. And he’d had quite a bit to confess!

How could Mercy believe her ignorant?

A window opened overhead and a woman leaned out to empty the contents of her chamber pot onto the street below. Mercy grabbed Georgette’s hand and yanked her along out of the way of the putrid spray.

“Sorry, duchess,” the woman called down. “Didn’t see ye there.” She hadn’t bothered to cinch her wrapper tight and her bare breasts flopped out for anyone to view.

Georgette had never seen anyone in such an appalling state of undress in public, not to mention someone so unconcerned about it. She put her head down and quickened her pace.

“Good heavens,” Georgette whispered once she was certain they were out of earshot. “She was all but naked.”

“Well, o’ course she was. Ye can’t expect the gentlemen to buy if they’ve no notion about the quality of the wares, can ye?” Mercy said cheerfully. “That was nothing but an accidental peep, her flashing her titties like she don’t know she did it. Some fellows likes that a lot. More than if the moll does it on purpose. Makes ’em feel like they’ve seen something they oughtn’t and it drives ’em fair wild.” Mercy tilted her head to one side. “Why is it, do ye suppose, that we like something even more if we’re not supposed to?”

“I’m sure I don’t know.”

Mercy laughed. “I’m sure ye don’t either. That was what ye might call retor…retri…oh, hang it all, what was that four-guinea word ye tried to teach me the other day?”

“Rhetorical?”

“That’s the one. I was being rhetorical. When it comes to matters of the flesh, ye’re about as useful as teats on a boar, if ye don’t mind me saying so, milady.”

“Actually, I’m thinking I may have overdone it when I encouraged you to speak your mind, Mercy. If you say something like that around my father, he’ll have you sacked before you can whistle.”

“I take yer point.” Mercy laid a finger alongside her nose in the time-honored gesture of collusion. “I’ll be careful to keep me teeth together around the marquis then.”

They pushed deeper into the alley.

“This is it. Madam Bouchard’s House of Pleasures for Gentlemen of Quality,” Mercy said when they came to a stop before a three-story clapboard structure.

It was a sorry parody of the fine brick Georgians in Mayfair and St. James’s, square-built with windows of decreasing size depending on the story on which they were situated. It had been years since the house had seen a paintbrush, and the pint-sized garden in front showed no evidence of cultivation. But black smoke billowed from three of the chimneys, so Madam Bouchard evidently believed in investing in sufficient coal to keep the interior warm.

A
prudent
choice, if everyone runs about half-clothed in there
.

Georgette knew well enough what a female body looked like in the altogether. She’d stood before the long looking glass in her room, pondering the changes her body had gone through over the years. But all her imagination had for fodder about nude men were the classical statues at the British Museum. Unfortunately, they had all either been vandalized in strategic places or were discretely covered with a marble fig leaf.

Oh, how she wondered what was so important it had to be hidden. Especially since the fig leaves weren’t all that big. She gave herself a mental shake. Her imagination was running rampant this morning.

“If it wasn’t the gentlemen who made you want to leave this life, what was it?” Georgette asked.

“It was the bully.” Mercy, who never showed any signs of trepidation, gave a little shiver.

“The bully? What’s that?”

“Not what. Who. In a whorehouse, the madam’s word is law, but she’s got to have somewhat to enforce it, don’t she?” Mercy clutched her cloak tighter around herself. “Otherwise, the gentlemen might get too frisky with the girls and whatever they wanted to do, there’d be no stoppin’ them.”

Mercy had led the way down the alley blithely enough, but now she made no move to advance through the wrought iron gate to the faded red door.

“That’s where the bully comes in. He makes sure one of the gentlemen don’t take a strap to a girl.” One of Mercy’s thin shoulders lifted in a shrug. “Unless he’s paid for the privilege, o’ course.”

“Paid for the—” There were some things even Georgette couldn’t imagine. She drew a deep breath and decided that she was indeed on the “ignorant side of useful.”

And
happy
to
be
there.

She cleared her throat. “It sounds as if this bully person is there for the girls’ protection.”

“That
is
how it sounds, don’t it?” Mercy shifted her weight from one foot to the other, like a sparrow on a windowsill so shallow it hadn’t room to settle. “Only there weren’t nobody to protect us from the protector.”

Georgette put a hand to her shoulder and the little maid stilled. “I’ll protect you, Mercy. No one will ever hurt you again.”

“And you’ll do the same for Vesta?”

Georgette nodded. Whoever this bully was, he dared not lift a hand to the daughter of a marquis or anyone she wished to shelter. If he did, her father would see the blackguard imprisoned or transported before he could spit.

“Now, let’s go see if your friend would like a new life.” Georgette pushed open the creaking gate and approached the red door. When she lifted her gloved hand to knock, Mercy stopped her.

“It ain’t locked,” she whispered as she turned the knob. “And best we goes quiet-like. That way we might be out again before Mr. Duggins knows we was in.”