Suzanne Robinson (6 page)

“Miss Dane, Harcourt is coming to join us, if you have a moment.”

“Of course.”

“So kind of you, for you see, he’s anxious to speak with you about an old book he’s found in his father’s
library. He asked me, but I’m hopeless about historical things, and I knew you’d be just the person to talk to.”

Acheson talked on, and Prim listened while trying to hide her humiliation. Acheson was a married man with a kind heart who had taken pity on her several times before at Society functions. He’d spotted her decorating a wall at an afternoon dance and made her his charity ever since.

“Before Harcourt comes, Miss Dane, I beg you to do me the honor of dancing with me,” Acheson said with a graceful bow.

And so she danced. And spoke with Harcourt, who obviously had made up his story of an old book just to be able to oblige his friend and dance with her. Harcourt was almost as well tailored and mannered as Acheson, and more handsome with his chestnut hair, blue eyes, and the glamor of being a cavalry officer. Prim began to forget being the object of charity and enjoy herself. She even enjoyed dancing with a third victim snared for her by Acheson, the Honorable Robert Montrose, who was indeed the prize of the three, even if he was also married.

Montrose combined charm, elegance, and breeding with an almost French appreciation of arts. Unlike many of Society’s male members, his conversation wasn’t limited to sport and gambling, and he actually knew the difference between a psalter and a book of hours.

“Miss Dane, I find it fascinating that you care for old books. I have a fine collection, you know. I have a book of carols, fourteenth century, I think.”

And so, in that hot ballroom, she became the object of attention from these three kind gentlemen. Their good deed, their protégée. At almost every ball, she could be assured that they would attend her and corner their eligible young friends to dance with her. Grateful and yet embarassed, Prim could think of no way to refuse their kindness.

After all, she didn’t want to stand against the wall and endure looks of pity and condescension. Indeed, dancing with her gentlemen friends was such pleasure, and dancing with Robert Montrose the greatest pleasure. He was the most graceful of the three, and the most handsome. They whirled and sailed around the ballroom, faster and faster. The heat grew stiffling, but they didn’t stop. On and on they danced, until Prim was so out of breath that her corset felt like a steel press.

Prim was awakened by a jolt of the cab. It had stopped, and her captor was moving. Her head fuzzy, suffering from the feelings of suffocation in her dream, she struggled to pull herself from the fog of confusion in which she found herself.

Nightshade descended and held out his hand. She blinked at him, afraid and too weary to do anything else. He sighed and lifted her to the ground. Dropping her unceremoniously on her feet, the ruffian shoved her ahead of him.

Prim glanced around at a world of fog that was rapidly turning a dim gray with the approach of morning. They were in a rear courtyard of some great deserted town house. When she saw the pitched roof high above her head and the dormer windows she
hesitated. This was the residence of someone of great wealth, but not of the person she expected. That person’s town house had no magnificent central dome resting on a base of Corinthian pilasters.

“Get on with you,” Nightshade said.

She turned on him. “Mr. Nightshade, you’ve broken into this house.”

“For a spinster you got a lot of fanciful notions.”

He shoved her down a flight of stairs, into a vestibule, through a series of uninhabited service rooms. As she passed the butler’s pantry, a man stepped into the hall, startling her and causing her to back into Nightshade. She trod on his boot. He swore, pulled her aside, and addressed the newcomer.

“Featherstone, is everything ready?”

“Yes, sir. If you will come this way?”

Prim was half escorted, half shoved after their host. Featherstone was a surprise to Prim. He cut a tall, kingly figure with the proud set to his head and his thick shock of silver hair. Prim had spent her life in houses like this. There was only one inhabitant who had such dignified bearing and manner of polite condescension. Featherstone was a butler. The ruffian had corrupted a butler!

Shaking her head, Prim almost forgot her own danger. Then she began to wonder why the ruffian had dragged her to this deserted place. At first she thought it was to murder her; then she realized he wouldn’t want a butler for the purpose. By the time they reached a vast hall and mounted a staircase of white Italian marble, she was growing even more confused. Her mystification reached new heights when
Featherstone stopped outside a pair of doors and opened them.

“I thought the Blue Boudoir would suit your needs, sir.”

“Thank you, Featherstone.”

Prim turned to stare at Mr. Nightshade. In their short acquaintance, she had never heard him speak so civilly, or so grammatically. When he shoved her through the doors, she realized that his civility was limited to Featherstone.

“Bath and clothes,” he snapped. “You’ll have to make do yourself. No lady’s maids around here. Don’t take long. We’re leaving quick.”

As she stared at him, he closed the door and locked it. Prim gaped at the place where he’d been. All at once she burst into motion. Rushing across what had to be a sitting room, she thrust aside blue silk curtains and searched for the lock to the tall windows that formed one wall of the room. Then she stopped, for beyond the glass, the windows had been fitted with decorative wrought-iron grillwork. She hurried into the bedroom and found the windows the same.

Pounding her fist on the sill, Prim sank down on a bench beneath the window. It was some time before she could master her frustration and renewed fears, but when she noticed her surroundings, she was again surprised. The room was free of dust and looked as if some great lady was in residence. It boasted an antique bed of state, complete with a carved gilt canopy and blue silk damask upholstery.

She rose and walked to the bed. On it lay a traveling dress of a shining bronze fabric with braided trim and
matching jacket. There were a bonnet, gloves, and underthings. Prim noticed gaslight coming from another room and found a bath prepared in what had once been a robing room. Steam from the water rose and beaded the surface of a mirror sitting on an eighteenth-century vanity. Prim glanced from the bath to the traveling dress on the bed. The ruffian had not only broken into the house but stolen clothes from the owners as well.

Her gaze drifted back to the bath. It, too, was stolen. She would be stealing if she used it. But her entire body felt caked with soot, and her arms and legs were sore from running and struggling with Mr. Nightshade. Nightshade! What if he were to come in while she bathed? Prim went to the door between the bedroom and the bathing room and closed it. There was a key in the lock. She turned it and faced the steaming bath. If she was going to be killed, at least she would spend her last hours clean.

The bath felt as good as it looked. Sitting in the tub with the steam rising all around her, Prim’s weary mind drifted away from thoughts of danger and death. This house was the kind of place to which she was accustomed. She had been born to a life in such houses. The past hadn’t prepared her for Whitechapel or the black-haired ruffian, for her parents had been Lord William Harold and Lady Frances Dane.

Prim would be the first to admit that her birth had been a disappointment. She could hardly miss the fact, since her mother talked of it often. There was a memory of being seven years old and allowed the privilege of coming downstairs when her mother’s
friends called. Prim, who spent most of her time with her nanny, was escorted into the drawing room to make her curtsey.

Lady Frances turned to her dear friend Lady Sarah with a lament Prim had overheard before. “I shall consider myself a failure until I have a son.”

The declaration had little effect on Prim. She was used to hearing it from time to time. The first occasion had been when she was five. Until that day, she had thought herself the center of her little world. That one sentence had sent her crashing into the depths of bewildered misery. Her birth had been a misfortune, unwelcome, a disappointment.

When she was eleven, John Harold had come along, and the entire household rejoiced. All at once, her mother was jubilant. She held her head high and beamed her pride for all to see. At first Prim could see no reason to celebrate. All John Harold did was eat, sleep, and squall like a cat in a sack. Later she became acquainted with this little intruder and fell in love with his chubby face and golden curls. He would go for walks with her, his little hand clasped trustingly in hers. He came to her when he fell and bumped his head. He depended upon her to teach him how to tie his shoes.

And she tried hard not to take her feelings out on him when her mother would gaze upon John Harold with rapture and say, “My dear little John has rescued me from the catastrophe of a daughter.” Or, “If I hadn’t had a son, my life would be a blank.”

In the years that followed, three more children were born to the Dane family. One was a boy, and his
death was much lamented. Two were girls, whose appearances and deaths were barely noted. But the family title and name were safe, for John Harold was strong and would continue the Dane lineage.

William Harold, Prim’s father, never lamented her birth as had her mother. Sir William was too busy attending to his horses, his gun dogs, his rents, and his liquor and gambling. However, Sir William’s most abiding interest was in the position of his family and name. In his library, the most valued books were those mentioning the Dane name. The most precious documents were those proving how old the title was, and that there wasn’t a draper or cobbler in the entire lineage.

And his daughter? Prim was certain that her father loved her. He had said so, in that offhand, fashionable way of his. He had said it in passing, as he was on his way to his club for an evening of cards and liquor. “You’ll be a comfort to your mother in her old age,” Sir William had said. Prim had rejoiced in her father’s approval. Her spirits had been high for weeks.

Prim worshipped her parents as one did remote gods on top of mountains. She gave her love to her nanny, Mrs. Peace, and to John Harold. Left to herself much of the time—her company hardly ever necessary to anyone—Prim grew up creating her own friends and occupations in daydreams and pursuing adventures through her studies and reading.

By the time she was eighteen, Prim was comfortable with her place in the family. She came first with Nanny Peace, and first in the family—after her father, John Harold, and her mother, that is. She was the one
whose engagements were canceled should anyone else need a carriage. She was the one whose preferences were asked last, if at all. Her place was to listen in admiration to her mother’s social triumphs, to John Harold’s tales of hunting rabbits and learning to jump a horse.

Prim sometimes offered little stories of her own, such as those of how she mastered French pronunciation, learned a piano sonata, or discovered a manuscript in the vast collection in the library. But her stories never seemed as interesting as the others. If they had been, her father wouldn’t have interrupted so often. Her mother wouldn’t have gotten that vacant look when Prim began, and John Harold wouldn’t have made fun of her. By the time her mother died, giving birth to a stillborn daughter, Prim had ceased almost entirely to recount her own adventures to the family.

The growing chill in the bathwater distracted Prim and called her attention to her wrinkled fingers and toes. She washed her hair, left the bath, and dressed. It was impossible to put on her old clothes. She couldn’t bear the idea of the soiled fabric next to her clean skin. She donned the traveling dress and vowed to repay its owner, should she live.

To distract herself while her hair dried, Prim found her old cloak and removed the book that had lain within it all this time. She slipped the small tome from the lining with exaggerated care, for the book was centuries old. It was an illuminated manuscript she had borrowed from her father’s library, quite valuable. Some might say she had no right to take it, as the
house and its contents were John Harold’s. But her brother hardly set foot in the library. He didn’t even know the book existed, while Prim loved it and knew its contents by heart. It was called
The Book of Hours of Yolande de Navarre
.

Ten years ago she’d come upon it while exploring the library, and she’d been studying illuminated manuscripts ever since. She dreamed of one day being able to write a treatise on the subject. But who would read it? Such a work would be of little use if no one saw it, and unless she could persuade some scholarly journal to publish it, no one would see it. Her chances weren’t good. While the world accepted ladies as novelists, Prim knew what reception lady scholars received.

At the moment she needed a place to put the book. She finally slipped it into a drawstring bag that had been set out with the gown. It was made of fabric matching the traveling dress. As she pulled the drawstrings, she heard the lock in the sitting-room door turn. Prim was tempted to rush into the bathing chamber and lock herself inside, but there was no other way out, and Mr. Nightshade would only break down the door.

The sound of his voice made her jump. “You might as well come out.”

Gripping her bag, Prim walked slowly into the sitting room. Nightshade wasn’t even looking when she came in. He was turning the key in a traveling trunk beside the writing desk. Prim had been too preoccupied to notice it. When her captor rose and pocketed the key, Prim was startled at the change in his appearance.

His hair had been swept back from his face and was still damp from washing. He wore a suit of fine wool, woven with threads of black and dark forest green. The fawn brocade of his waistcoat contrasted with the dark suit, as did the fine linen of his shirt. The details of the cut of his coat, the semifitted waist, the slight flare near the hem, the lapel slant well above the waistline, all spoke of some little, unpretentious, and horribly expensive shop in the Strand.