The Bride Wore Pearls (13 page)

He sat up and she followed, restoring her clothing to order with one well-placed tug.

“I desire you, Anisha,” he said, unable to turn and look her in the eyes. “I . . . I worship you. You know that—but it is madness all the same.”

“Then we find ourselves at an impasse again, do we not?” she said quietly. “You wish to tell me what to do. But you do not wish to share my life in that most meaningful of ways.”

She was right, he realized. That was the ugly simplicity of it. There was a line between them that would not be crossed. A path already destined. Promises already made. Nothing had changed, save for that dark, yawning chasm of longing, and of opportunities missed, that seemed to deepen every bloody day.

He wasn’t sure how long he sat there in the arbor, her hand cupping his face, neither of them making any move.

“I have to go,” he finally said.

“Where?” she asked, withdrawing her hand at last. “Where is it you
have
to go?”

“Quartermaine’s,” he said, straightening. “I was on my way down. I need to talk to him. About Peveril’s death.”

“You think he knows something?”

Rance just shook his head and stared into the daffodils. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.”

“Wait,” she said, rising to smooth her skirts. “I will take the flowers in, then go with you.”

He made a sound that was half a laugh, and half a sound of dismay. “To the Quartermaine Club?” he said. “That ought to make your brother even happier.”

“And I believe we have already established that my brother’s happiness is not my problem,” she said, turning and starting down the path. “And that my life is none of his business.”

He stood and stepped from the canopy of green, unable to do anything but stare after her. Back down the garden path, Anisha scooped up his flowers and turned toward the house. The real world slowly came back to him; the thick, rising warmth of the mews behind, redolent of hay and horse manure. The clatter of traffic coming up Park Street. The sight of Ruthveyn’s parlor maid behind the conservatory, beating a small carpet with the flat of her broom.

Anisha wanted to go to Quartermaine’s.

And he was tired of fighting with her.

He had believed that Bessett was going to save her from him. But he was not.

A few yards along, she turned, shooting him an impatient glance. “Well?” she said, both arms heaped with his roses. “Are you coming? Or not?”

He shoved her handkerchief into his coat pocket and pushed away from Ruthveyn’s arbor.

T
he Strand at midday was no place for the leisurely shopper. Unlike the fashionably sedate venues catering to Mayfair—Bond Street, Burlington Arcade, and that burgeoning gentleman’s paradise, Savile Row—the Strand was all elbows, clamor, and clatter.

Today was especially frenetic, with midday shoppers out in force, pushing past one another amid the hawking cries of newsboys and street vendors. Anaïs de Rohan, however, knew how to use her elbows as well as the next person. She put both to good use now, forcing an especially pushy pieman from her path while simultaneously holding a bandbox and wedging open the shop door for her elderly cousin.

Maria Vittorio stood pat on the pavement, scowling. “Not this one,
cara
.”

Exasperated, Anaïs puffed out her cheeks. “There will be carpets here, Maria,” she insisted. “The best ones—and for us, at a good price.”

Maria glanced at the shop’s only marking, a discreet brass plaque:

M. Jean-Claude Lefèvre

Purveyor of Elegant Oddities and Fine Folderol

“See?” said Anaïs. “Under new management.”

Maria rolled her eyes, muttered something in Italian, and pushed past.

Once inside the shop, Anaïs gasped. As always, elegant glass cases lined two walls, catching the early afternoon light to set row upon row of antique stemware and gem-crusted jewelry afire. In a rear corner, a mysterious-looking Egyptian sarcophagus stood on end, open but absent its corpse. An array of chandeliers glittered above hideous, befeathered masks from savage lands and Grecian statues which had survived the vagaries of history, while fine carpets lined the floors and walls—the latter interspersed with rows of Dutch landscapes.

Though she had little understanding of antiquities, Anaïs had occasionally come here as a child with her father, always going away breathless. She was not perfectly sure what had drawn de Vendenheim to this place; something to do with ill-got gains and police business, she supposed, the former proprietor having always danced on the edge of the law.

Still, regardless of the shop’s chequered past, it was quite an impressive sight.

It was also quite unoccupied.

She drifted past a table artfully arranged with a dozen blue and white porcelain vases—Yuan Dynasty, the rarest of the rare, and more costly than a small house in East End—all of which Anaïs knew only because the thick, white card propped on the table told her so.

“No one is here,” said Maria sourly. “Quick, stick one in your bandbox.”

“I heard that!” Suddenly, the jangle of curtain rings cut into the silence.

Anaïs spun around. A lithe, elegantly dressed man wearing a black monocle stood bracketed by the bottle green draperies that still shimmered from the force of having been thrown wide.

“
Il figlio del diavolo
!” said Maria under her breath.

“Mr. Kemble!” Anaïs cried. “What are you doing here?”

“Slumming, my dear. And
frightfully
.” George Kemble popped the monocle from his eye and strolled toward them, swinging it lazily from its black silk cord. “How do you do, Miss de Rohan? And look! You’ve brought Catherine de Medici again!”

“Mr. Kemble,” said Anaïs chidingly. “I think you know my cousin.”

“Indeed,” he said, walking a bit of a circle around Maria as he came. “And whilst my Italian is a tad rusty, I gather she just called me
Satan’s spawn.
”

“No,” Anaïs lied, catching his arm and turning him back toward the showcases. “She said you had delightful taste in interior design.”

“My dear girl, one knows the evil eye when one sees it.” Kemble cut a glance over his shoulder. “Why do I always get the sneaking suspicion that woman is placing some strange Tuscan curse upon me?”

“
Sì
,” said Maria snidely. “On your firstborn. When do you think that will be, eh?”

Kemble trilled with laughter. “Oh, you are ever a sly one, Mrs. V,” he said.

Defensively, Anaïs seized both the conversation and Kemble’s arm. “My, what a lovely spittoon,” she interjected, motioning through the glass to distract him. “How much is it?”

Kemble looked at her a little witheringly. “Oh, you really are your father’s child. That’s a hand-carved jade, Qing Dynasty cachepot mounted on solid silver. And it is priceless.”

“Well,
priceless
would be out of my price range.” Anaïs steered him further from Maria. “And yes, Papa always found you invaluable. But tell me, why are you here? He said you’d sold the business.”

“Apparently, I cannot even
give
this place away!” he sniffed with an airy toss of his hand. “Jean-Claude is off in Provence. Another dying grandmother—the cemeteries of France must be perfectly
clogged up
with them, for it’s his fifth or sixth, I’m sure. So I’m stuck here cooling my heels amidst the riffraff of the Strand, whilst the aphids make ready to feast upon my roses.”

He did not, however, look especially displeased, Anaïs thought, her gaze running over him. Though he was not as young as he’d once been, George Kemble still looked lean, quick, and faintly predatory, the silver at his temples serving only to lend him gravitas—not that he’d needed it—and the shade perfectly matching the faint gray stripe in his oh-so-fashionable trousers.

Anaïs had no doubt the fabric had been chosen for just that reason. Kemble’s particular friend, Maurice Giroux, owned many of London’s most exclusive tailors and haberdasheries.

“I’m very sorry about Jean-Claude’s grandmother,” she said solemnly.

“And my roses?” he asked tartly, pausing to polish the monocle with his silk handkerchief.

“Well,” said Anaïs, smiling, “I think I shall feel more sorry for the aphids once you can turn the full force of your wrath on them.”

Mr. Kemble sighed, his shoulders sagging a little as he tucked the monocle away. “Well, I suppose the truth is,” he said without looking at her, “that life in Buckhurst Hill has been a tad tedious ever since old Dickie Turpin turned up his toes.”

Anaïs hesitated. “But . . . wasn’t that a hundred years ago?”

“My point precisely,” said Kemble with a disdainful sniff. “Dull as ditchwater ever since, the whole village. Were the man still breathing, the boredom would kill him. But the occasional holiday was not enough for Maurice. He wanted a proper garden. A bigger kitchen. A
conservatory,
for God’s sake. ‘How much money, George,’ he often said to me, ‘does one require to be happy?’ And the answer is
pots
. But we’ve got buckets. And yet, sometimes it just isn’t . . .” His words withered.

“Sometimes it isn’t about the money,” she finished, catching his arm again.

“Just so! It’s about the thrill of the thing. The chase, so to speak.” Kemble waved his free hand theatrically as they roamed the shop. “That dark, glittering edge of . . . well, let us call it
intrigue
.”

Anaïs knew precisely what he meant. She often felt it, too. And he was not talking, precisely, about the acquisition of rare antiquities. Over the years, George Kemble had had his fingers in a great many pies, some far less wholesome than others. And his business dealings had not been confined to selling pretty pieces of porcelain to the dull dowagers of Mayfair.

His relationship with her father, too, had been complex. Sometimes adversaries, sometime allies, the men had forged a strange, unholy alliance, with her father often looking the other way, since his occasional need for Kemble’s specialized knowledge had sometimes superseded the strictest requirements of the law.

“Well,” she said consolingly, “at least you have roses now.”

Kemble smiled tightly. “And so I do,” he said. “Ah, well, my personal travails can be of no interest to you, child. What brought you to Jean-Claude today?”

“Oh, yes!” Anaïs returned her mind to the mission at hand. “Maria thinks I ought to purchase new carpets for the drawing rooms. I thought he would have only the best.”

“And he shall,” said Kemble confidently, “having been trained by that most discerning arbiter of good taste and fine décor—
moi
.”

“Indeed. So will you help me choose something?” asked Anaïs, unfurling her upholstery sample from the bandbox.

He sighed again. “Someone must, I daresay, for both your parents are hopelessly without éclat, verve, panache, or any other fashionable French phrase,” he said, snatching the fabric. “Follow me into the back.”

Anaïs glanced around. Maria had dozed off in a chair by the door. “But there are a great many nice carpets here,” she said, her eyes settling on a gold fringed affair beneath the sarcophagus.

Kemble turned to shake a finger in her face. “No, no, my dear girl,” he said. “This is the commonest stuff imaginable. I will show you our private stock.”

“Will you?” Anaïs followed him through the green draperies. “I feel honored.”

“As well you should.” Kemble trailed through the workbenches and cupboards to a higgledy-piggledy stack of Turkey carpets piled twenty or thirty high. “But only the best will do, I think, since I hear
these
carpets are to be for a most special occasion.”

“Oh, you heard that, did you?” Anaïs grinned.

Kemble began to throw back the corners of the rugs, as if searching for something in particular. “Indeed, and I hear, too, that you’ve fallen in with the
Fraternitas
. I always knew the women in your family were fey. Now, morning sun? Or afternoon?”

For an instant, Anaïs froze. “Uh, morning, mostly,” she said. “And the . . .
Fraternitas
? I’m not sure I follow.”

Kemble cut an incredulous glance up from the pile, then, “No, no, no, no, no,” he said, snapping back the next five rugs. “Now, Monsieur Belkadi.
There
is a young man after my own heart. And handsome Lazonby, the infamous card-sharping killer is simply too luscious for—ah!
Here
it is.”

“Here is what?”

“A Persian Bidjar,” he said, seizing her fabric. “And I have a
pair
.”

“A pair? So you’ll discount one, then?”

Kemble looked at her in exasperation. “Have you any notion how rare a matched pair of Bidjars is?” he asked, billowing the upholstery out until it settled across the exposed carpet. “You say it like we’re discussing butter and eggs when—
oh, my God
!”