The Bride Wore Scarlet (15 page)

“Is lust petty?”

“Most of the time, I think.” He leaned forward, and set his glass down hard
.
“And for men, lust is just lust. There isn't anything romantic about it, if that's what you're thinking.”

“Have you never been in love, then?” Even to Anaïs, her voice sounded wistful.

He gave a harsh laugh. “Not even close, thank God.”

“You have an aversion to marriage?”

He shrugged. “I haven't an heir,” he said. “Not even a distant cousin. So yes, I mean to do my duty to the title. But there aren't too many women who would care to live with a sword hanging over their heads. A man who senses things unnatural. You just saw how it can be—and trust me, that little hint of darkling was nothing.”

“Heavens, Geoff, you must think all women cowards,” she murmured. Then she sat back down and leaned near. “I haven't a vast deal of experience, perhaps, like some of the women you are used to. But I am no inexperienced virgin.”

For an instant, naked curiosity sketched across his face. “Are you . . . some other sort of virgin?”

“Not any sort at all,” she said, smiling sweetly.

“I see.” He swallowed hard, the sinuous muscles of his throat working up and down. “And what about Mr. Right?”

“When I find Mr. Right,” said Anaïs, leaning nearer still, “he won't give a ha'penny whether I'm a virgin or not.”

Geoff cleared his throat awkwardly. “And you know that how?”

“Otherwise, he would not be Mr. Right,” she replied. “Because Mr. Right is perfect for me. Destined for me. And that's the end of it.”

“I think it had better be the end of this conversation,” said Geoff, bracing one hand along the back of the sofa to rise. “I think I know when I have pressed my luck a little too far.”

Anaïs straightened on the sofa. “What do you mean?”

“Never mind,” he said. “I believe I shall go out for a walk. A very long walk. Shall I see you at dinner?”

“Oh, very well,” said Anaïs. “But that won't do much to alleviate my boredom.”

“Then suggest something,” said Geoff, his hand already on the doorknob. “Something that does not include you and me naked on a bed.”

“I love how that just rolls off your tongue,” said Anaïs, turning to look at him over the back of the sofa. “And to be perfectly honest, I would love to see you naked.”

“Anaïs,” he said warningly. “Suggest something.”

“Very well.” She smiled brightly. “I think I shall go across the street and drop our cards on the Vicomte de Lezennes.”

“You cannot be serious.”

“Why not?” said Anaïs. “I mean to ask them to dinner. Tomorrow evening, as a matter of fact. If you cannot be persuaded, I shall hone my feminine wiles on Lezennes.”

Chapter 10

He who is prudent and lies in wait for an enemy who is not, will be victorious.

Sun Tzu,
The Art of War

I
n the end, Anaïs did not go across the street. Over dinner, and with very little difficulty, Geoff found himself able to persuade her that it would look unwise to appear overly forward; that it was better to cast one's line, then reel the bait slowly past Lezennes, rather than simply whack him over the head with the pole.

Anaïs sulked for a moment over her dessert—or pretended to sulk, Geoff thought, for she came around quickly enough, then suggested a hand of piquet afterward.

Geoff, however, was almost afraid to be alone with the woman. Oh, he was a gentleman, he supposed—for what little that was worth—but no one had ever accused him of being a saint. And if Anaïs kept pressing the issue—kept pressing her body so hungrily to his and looking up at him with those eyes like dark pools of desire—he was apt to give her precisely what she was asking for.

Most unwise, when she was waiting for Mr. Right. And that, apparently, was not Geoff.

So he had excused himself and gone for another walk. Before this godforsaken mission was over, he sourly considered, he was apt to know Brussels right down to the very gutters that carried the sewage into the Senne.

But what alternative was left to him? Getting roaring drunk was not an option; he was on a mission, and even his growing desire for Anaïs had not blinded him to that fact. Besides, intoxication was probably the surest way to find himself standing at her bedroom door in the middle of the night with one hand on the knob.

Worse still, she would likely know it.

Already he had noticed that about Anaïs. Even before they had left England, he'd got the oddest notion she had eyes in the back of her head. She might protest that she had no Gift, that she had learned nothing from Giovanni Vittorio. But she had an unerring sense about his presence in a room.

Already he had seen her address the servants to give one odd order or another without so much as lifting her head from her desk—address them by name, before he was even aware of their presence. And then there was that night—that night which seemed so long ago, when he'd walked with DuPont up to St. Catherine's.

There had been a woman in a pitch-black alley—a lady, by the sound of her voice—with a knife set to the throat of some hapless degenerate who'd snatched a strand of pearls. Cool as spring water she'd been, kicking him in the knackers, then tucking her knife away as casually as another female might straighten the lace of her cuff. Yes, he thought about it now, and he wondered.

Over the next several days, as they observed the rhythms of the house across the street, Geoff watched her more carefully—watched, that was to say, something besides the intriguing sway of her hips, or the way her eyes brightened when he came into a room.

At breakfast one morning, she asked Petit about a strange taste in the omelet that had been sent up. The footman had hastened away, and returned faintly red-faced to admit the cook had inadvertently added sage when she'd meant to add pepper. Those eggs had been served instead at the servants' table. But the bowl had not been washed.

Some days later, they were sequestered in the attic room, taking turns at the telescopes. Occupied in thumbing through DuPont's last pile of papers, Anaïs apparently heard the latch on Lezennes' front door click open. Geoff, who had been watching a housemaid dusting the windowsills in Giselle's room, had known nothing of it until Anaïs appeared at his elbow.

“I wonder where she is going,” Anaïs had mused, watching as the governess came out. “She left at four the last several days.”

“It's Thursday,” Geoff murmured, leaning forward to make a notation in the log. “A short day, perhaps?”

“Perhaps,” Anaïs murmured, watching the tidy gray figure vanish down the street.

“You have keen hearing,” he remarked, glancing up from his paper.

“Do I?” Anaïs smiled, and drifted away from the window. “Mamma always complained I had selective hearing. That I could hear a pin drop when I wished, and ignore her calls to supper when I was playing in the garden.”

Geoff closed the ledger, and tried to stretch the stiffness from his limbs. “I think we've learned about as much as we are going to,” he said, rising. “I believe it's time we made it a little harder for our reticent neighbors to ignore us.”

“Well, finally,” said Anaïs. “
Now
may we call upon Lezennes?”

“No, I think not,” said Geoff. “That would be too obvious. Recall that Madame Moreau already sent her regrets for your little tea—Lezennes' doing, I'd wager.”

Anaïs had drifted around the room, and back to the window. “He does not wish either of them to have contact with the outside world, I suspect,” she said, arms stubbornly crossed as she stared across the street.

“And she is afraid of him,” Geoff mused. “I feel it.”

“It is not your imagination,” said Anaïs. “That place fairly radiates evil. I am sure that is the source of what you were seeing the other day. Lezennes wants to keep them isolated.”

“Aye, because if she knows no one, then she has no one to whom she can turn for help,” Geoff added. “So we must manage to look as useless and benign as possible.”

“Perhaps we should be poor?” Anaïs remarked.

“Aye, let's suggest to Madame Moreau that we live on a strict allowance from my father,” he proposed. “That he pays all our bills, and watches our every sou.”

Anaïs snorted. “Suggest it when?” she muttered. “She isn't even permitted to come across the street for tea.”

“No, but she goes to the park every day at one.” Geoff snatched his coat from the back of the chair, and threw it on. “And there she meets with Lezennes.”

“And so?”

“So get your cloak,” he ordered. “I'll fetch my easel. Perhaps it's time we met Lezennes, and showed him what harmless flibbertigibbets we are.”

L
ocated in the London heart of Her Majesty's Government, Four Whitehall Place was an unassuming house that backed onto a far more infamous courtyard, a yard that legend held had once belonged to the ancient Kings of Scotland. And while a lady might—on very rare occasions—venture through the portals of Number Four, she would on no account be seen round back, for Scotland Yard had fast become the most notorious of London's police stations, and a common point of ingress and egress for much of what constituted Westminster's relentlessly revolving rabble.

And so it was that on a lovely spring afternoon, the Earl of Lazonby escorted Lady Anisha Stafford up the steps to the slightly more proper administrative entrance, held open the door, and bowed.

Lady Anisha swept past him, nose held faintly in the air, still not entirely pleased with the bargain she'd struck. Just inside the door, there was a sort of porter's post, but it was vacant. She looked about, uncertain what to do.

“Come on,” said Lazonby a little gruffly. “We'll just go up.”

Lady Anisha set a hand to her chest. “What, unannounced?”

“It's Number Four, not Buckingham Palace,” he grumbled, steering her toward the stairs. “Besides, you promised.”

“And you promised to go with me to the theatre,” she countered.

“Which I—”

“—did, yes,” she interjected, “only to snore your way through Donizetti's last aria.”

“That song dragged, Nish, like a crooked plow behind a lame horse,” he said. “You're lucky it ended before I expired of boredom and rigor mortis set in. How would you have got my stiffened corpse back down those narrow stairs?”

“It was ‘
Una Furtiva Lagrima
'!” she cried. “It was heart-wrenching! And quite possibly the world's greatest tenor aria.”

“I confess, I'm a Philistine,” Lazonby grumbled. “Sorry if I spoiled your evening with your future in-laws. But it was your choice, Nish, to take me. You know what I am.”

Lady Anisha continue to sputter and complain as Lazonby hauled her up the steps, but in a low undertone, informing him in no uncertain language that the place was a little dingy, and smelled of boiled vegetables and stale sweat. Lazonby responded by explaining—in his usual blunt fashion—that the sort of people who came to Number Four generally had good cause to sweat.

At the top of the second flight of stairs, they turned into a long, narrow chamber divided by a low, gated bar such as one might see in a magistrate's court—not that Lady Anisha had ever laid eyes on one of those, either, but she had seen Mr. Cruickshank's courtroom caricatures in the print shops round town, which was almost the same thing.

Behind the little wall sat a pair of matched clerks—or at least she supposed that they were matched, for much like a brace of footmen, the black-coated fellows were of similar height and weight—which was to say very long and thin—and perched upon stools at either side of a tall desk, which made them look rather like a set of black andirons, forever welded as one.

On Lady Anisha's side of the wall, there were a few chairs—very straight-backed chairs, with no upholstery, not even so much as a pillow.

“They don't want you to get comfortable here, Nish,” said Lord Lazonby when she remarked upon the discomfort. “This is a place of suffering and inconvenience.”

“Well, I seem to be suffering a vast deal of inconvenience on your behalf.” Lady Anisha waved an elegant hand to forestall the frightful mélange of ink, coal smoke, and cooked turnips wafting up from the bowels of somewhere. “How long must we sit here?”

Lazonby gestured at a rather grand slab of a door at the far end of the room. “Until that door opens, and I manage to wedge my foot in it.”

Being far more obliging than Lord Lazonby, the door chose that moment to swing wide. Two men came out, one portly and pretentious-looking, with a thick gold watch chain stretched taut across his belly, and a score of long black hairs wrapped resolutely round his bald head, then pomaded into a sort of greasy tonsure.

Towering over him, the second man was far more interesting. The assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police was a svelte, broad-shouldered fellow with a nose that resembled a meat cleaver and a thick head of dark hair trimmed to precision. His cheeks were lean and scraped unfashionably clean of whiskers, and with his hard, dark eyes, he put Lady Anisha very much in mind of a bird of prey.

She recognized him at once and came to her feet, sweeping past Lazonby. “Assistant Commissioner Napier,” she said brightly, offering a bejeweled hand. “How lovely to see you again. Might we have a moment?”

The portly man having vanished, Royden Napier's gaze was now shifting suspiciously back and forth between his new callers. “Lady Anisha, a pleasure,” he said stiffly. “And by
we
, you would mean . . . ?”

“Lord Lazonby and me,” she said, smiling.

Napier wanted to refuse; that could not have been more apparent.

But much to his discomfort, Napier was now indebted to Lady Anisha's brother, if only a little. And he was curious—very curious—about her.

Despite her protestations to Lord Lazonby, Lady Anisha had not failed to notice Napier at her brother's wedding. Both before and after their fleeting introduction, the assistant commissioner had watched her almost incessantly from one corner of his eye. And when at last he'd approached her, he had been stiffly formal. But those eyes! Oh, they had never let up.

Perhaps she reminded him of someone from the criminal underworld. Or perhaps, like much of society, he was merely suspicious of her honey-colored skin and dark hair.

Whatever it was—as Lazonby had predicted—it was enough to preclude him from telling them both to go to hell. Instead, he invited them into his office—which, to those unlucky few forced to come here, might have been the very same as hell for all Lady Anisha knew.

Certainly Royden Napier looked like the sort of man who might have been on speaking terms with the devil.

“Well,” he said tightly when they were seated before his massive oak desk. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“We want you to reopen a case,” said Lord Lazonby, forgoing any niceties. “The murder of Lord Percy Peveril.”

“But we have already had a conviction in that case,” said Napier, looking pointedly at Lazonby. “
You
.”

Lazonby jerked to his feet. “And it was
overturned
,” he said, planting a hand in the middle of the assistant commissioner's desk. “But I shall never be free of it, Napier, until Peveril's real killer is found and convicted. You know that.”

“I trust you'll pardon me, my lord, when I say that I find deathbed recantations a trifle suspect,” said Napier coldly. “Especially when the grieving widow seems to come into a rather vast sum of money afterward.”

“I was
in jail
when that happened, you fool,” Lazonby growled into his face.

“Indeed, you were,” said Napier, “though it took me many long years to get you out of North Africa and back behind bars. But your father, the previous earl, was not in jail. He was free to—”

“Do not you dare drag my father's good name into this, Napier.” Lazonby's face had gone dangerously colorless, his hands fisted around the chair arms. “He did nothing to deserve having this vile business brought down upon his head.”

“Nothing save having a hot-tempered, cardsharping wastrel for a son,” Napier countered. “Lie down with dogs, Lazonby, get up with fleas.”

“You damned fool,” said Lazonby hotly. “I was set up to take the blame for someone else. Am I the only one who wants to know why? Does the Crown not care that a killer walks free?”

“As I recall, your case was pretty cut and dried.”

“Yes, and your late father was the very chap who cut it and dried it, Napier, and he did it with about as much forethought as another man might mow down a hayfield—with no regard for what might have been concealed within the grass. Instead, he just hacked it all to bits.”