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He was not an old, fat lecher. He was tall and dark-haired, thirty at most. He was quite unmissable.
‘Now, there’s a sight for sore eyes,’ Sal murmured appreciatively at her side.
Rosalie nodded mutely. Most of the men in here favoured the current fashion for fancy tailcoats in blue or bottle-green superfine, padded at the shoulders and adorned with ridiculously large silver-gilt buttons that would lend themselves to the cartoons of Cruikshank or Gillray. But he—her man—was dressed casually, almost roughly, in a long grey overcoat that hung open to reveal a rumpled linen shirt and a horseman’s tight buckskin breeches tucked into worn leather riding boots. Instead of a high starched cravat, he wore a simple white neckerchief knotted loosely at his throat.
He looked angry, determined, and—absolutely gorgeous. His wide-set eyes smouldered with fiery challenge beneath jet-black brows. And his careless attire served only to emphasise the masculine perfection of his body—that broad chest, tapering downwards to lean hips and muscular thighs … I’m sorry to let you down, Helen, but perfect is the only word for it. Fascinated, she let her gaze rove back up to his face, noting how his untamed dark hair lent dramatic emphasis to those lean, sculpted features and that amazingly sensual mouth.
His firm jaw was shadowed with at least a day’s stubble. He looked as though he didn’t give a fig for the company he’d disturbed. An aura of danger emanated from him, together with the cynicism of a man who’d already seen rather more of life than he should.
Yet—you only had to look at him to imagine being in his arms. To imagine doing things a well-bred girl shouldn’t even be thinking of. What was he doing here? You know the answer to that, you fool. Yet somehow, he—her man—looked as if he hated all this just as much as she did.
Don’t be an idiot, Rosalie. She could just imagine Helen proclaiming with a snort of derision, ‘Of course, a man prefers to pay for a woman, because the act of purchase means he can discard her the minute he’s had enough of her!’
Just for one incredible moment, his gaze met hers so searingly that she felt as if he was undressing her with his eyes. The warm colour suffused her skin. Then he turned his back on the place with a shrug of scorn and walked out. She felt, ridiculously, a sense of loss. A few minutes later the curtains were gliding shut and the girls, chattering avidly, were being shepherded off the stage. Back in the dressing room Rosalie put her hands to her flushed cheeks. Sweet heaven, who was that man?
And then Sal came over, and was digging her in the ribs. ‘Isn’t he just about the most gorgeous creature you’ve ever seen? Don’t try to deny it. I saw you staring!’ She chuckled.
Rosalie’s heart plummeted. ‘Does he … come here regularly, then?’
‘Lord alive, never seen him in here before, more’s the pity. Shouldn’t think he has to pay for his pleasures, should you?’ Sal put more powder on her nose. ‘But I’ve just heard one of the girls saying he teaches sword fighting to the gentry and is known as the Captain, because he was in the army for years.’
Never seen him in here before. Rosalie was already scraping her long hair back into a tight coil. That was as well. Because she could just imagine Linette—anyone—going off with him at one beckoning glint from those wicked, slanting dark eyes.
Then she reached for the everyday clothes she’d arrived in and started towards the changing room. Sal jumped in front of her. ‘Now, just a minute. What are you doing, gal?’
‘Going home,’ answered Rosalie calmly. Just as soon as I’ve paid a quick visit to Dr Barnard’s office.
‘What? You’re not stayin’ on?’
‘I was only hired to do the stage show, I made that quite clear … Whatever’s the matter, Sal? You look worried!’ In fact, more than worried—Sal looked almost frightened.
‘Dr Barnard spoke to me about you earlier,’ Sal whispered, glancing round to make sure they weren’t overheard. ‘He said I had to make sure you stayed on for the dancin’, see, even if it’s just for a bit!’
‘But why? I told him I’d appear on stage and nothing further, at least for the first night!’ In fact, Rosalie didn’t have the slightest intention of coming back here at all if she could help it.
Sal bit her lip. ‘Dr B. was hopin’ that perhaps you’d change your mind. New girls are always a draw, see, especially ones as pretty as you. And—’ her fingers knotted together nervously ‘—if you don’t show upstairs, I get the push, Rosalie.’
‘Oh, Sal …’
‘But it’s all right,’ went on Sal bravely, ‘you go, it’s not your fault—it’s a lousy place, this!’
Rosalie was desperate to get at that secret register. If not tonight, then she’d come back tomorrow and endure the stage show yet again; there was nothing else for it. But to go upstairs, on offer to all those men …
‘Well, look at little Miss Prim and Proper!’ It was Charlotte, sneering at Rosalie’s drab cloak. ‘So you’re disappearin’ already, are you? Of course, you won’t want to face the fact that nobody out there is going to be in the slightest bit interested in paying out good money for you!’
‘That’s as well, isn’t it?’ answered Rosalie calmly. ‘Since I never wanted them to.’
Charlotte glared. ‘I told Perceval—Dr Barnard—you was too high in the instep for this place! He’s just doin’ his accounts, down in his office, but soon as he arrives up here, I’ll tell him you ain’t nothing but a stuck-up troublemaker!’
Down in his office. Botheration. Rosalie put down her clothes and shook her hair loose. ‘Actually, Charlotte,’ she said, ‘I’ve changed my mind. I am staying.’
Charlotte’s mouth opened and closed. Sal swung back to Rosalie. ‘Oh, my Gawd, girl, don’t do this just for me! You said you were dead set against joining the dancing, and I understand, I really do …’
Rosalie set her chin stubbornly. ‘Sal, how long does Dr Barnard usually take to do his accounts?’
‘Oh, ten minutes or so, that’s all, then he’s eager to mingle with his gents upstairs!’
‘Well, I’ll go upstairs, too,’ declared Rosalie. ‘Just long enough to make sure he sees me there, then I’ll slip away. Will that do?’
‘Won’t it, just!’ breathed Sal. ‘Thanks, gal, for savin’ my job here. But …’ she patted Rosalie’s cheek ‘… put some rouge on, eh? You got to look as if you mean it!’
Sal hurried off upstairs. Slowly Rosalie dabbed on a little rouge, hating it. Once more, now that she was on her own, she remembered that terrible winter night two months ago, when she’d received the message from Helen. Rosalie, I’m so sorry, I’ve found your sister.
Memories of a spring morning came back to her unbidden. She had been a small but leggy ten-year-old and Linette just eight. There’d been a storm in the night, with the wind and rain howling around the oak woods that surrounded their village, and at first light she and Linette had raced down to the stream at the bottom of their garden to see how the moorhens’ nest they’d been watching for days had fared.
Linette had been entranced by the newly hatched chicks, huddled in their sprawling mound of twigs that was lodged precariously against a small island in the centre of the river. But the morning after the storm Rosalie saw that the high waters had loosened the nest and any minute it might be dragged away, chicks and all, by the muddy brown flow.
Hitching up her skirts and pulling off her shoes, Rosalie had waded in, while little Linette, so pretty even then, had watched from the bank, her hands pressed to her cheeks. Rosalie, up to her knees in water and challenged by the mother moorhen squawking its outrage, steadily placed stones and twigs around the unwieldy nest full of open-beaked chicks until it was firmly anchored again in a cleft of the leafy island.
‘Oh, Rosalie! You’ve saved the babies!’ Linette had been ecstatic.
From the top of their garden, Rosalie and Linette’s mother, not well even then, had been watching, too. As they ran back up to her, she’d hugged her girls tightly to her. ‘My brave darling Rosalie,’ she’d said in her broken English. ‘And Linette. You are both mes petits anges, my little angels!’
That was when Rosalie had noticed the bucket and brush by the wall of the house and realised that their mother had been crying. And then she had seen the words, painted on the side of their outhouse, that her mother must have been trying to scrub away when they came running up from the river. You don’t belong here, French whore.
Later that morning at the village school Rosalie had shown her new teacher the story she’d written about a bird in its floating nest travelling far downstream and finding a new life.
That young teacher was Helen Fazackerley and she had read Rosalie’s story with absorbed attention. ‘This is wonderful, Rosalie,’ she had said quietly. ‘Is this something you would like to do? Travel and discover new places?’
Rosalie had looked steadily up at her teacher. ‘If we went somewhere else, would they be kinder to my mother, Miss Fazackerley?’
* * *
On, on flew Rosalie’s memories, to the December of last year. A cold evening, a bitter evening, in damp, bleak London. Rosalie had by then been staying with Helen for two months, searching all the daylight hours and more for Linette; asking at the theatres, the opera houses, everywhere she could think of for her sister; following clues that too quickly went cold. Rosalie, I’m in London. I’m in trouble. Please help me.
But it was Helen, who regularly went out at night with a group of her church friends to take soup and bread to the hungry in some of the worst districts of London, who found Linette at last.
Rosalie had been reading little Toby his bedtime story when she’d received Helen’s message. Biddy, their good young neighbour, had come in to look after Toby, while Rosalie, with one of Biddy’s brothers, hurried to meet Helen at the address she’d give her—a rubbish-strewn attic off the Ratcliffe Highway. There, on a dank mattress beneath a broken skylight, lay her nineteen-year-old sister, her once-lovely face pinched with grief and illness, while at her side a beautiful little girl with dark curls gazed up at the newcomers, clutching a battered rag doll and whispering, ‘Mama. Mama.’
Rosalie’s search for her sister was at an end.
Helen had immediately taken the crying infant to her house in Clerkenwell. In the meantime Rosalie had fought hard to conceal not just her grief, but her overwhelming rage as she’d held her sister in her arms and stroked back her hair from her forehead. ‘Take me to him,’ Linette had whispered as she clutched her sister’s hand.
‘Who, Linette?’ Rosalie had tried so hard to keep her voice steady, though the pain in her heart had threatened to choke her.
‘He has a castle. A wonderful castle. Take me to him, please …’ Linette had been struggling to speak by then. Faintly she’d breathed his name—then died, moments later, in Rosalie’s arms.
Since then, Rosalie had redoubled her efforts to find Linette’s destroyer, working her way round every London theatre, high and low. Not asking outright, for that brought danger; but pretending she was looking for a lost friend. And a few days ago, fast running out of hope, she’d visited a seedy little theatre off the Strand.
The greasy-haired manager, Alfred Marchmont, had said curiously, ‘I remember a girl called Linette. Linette Lavalle, that was it—pretty, she was, well spoken, with fair hair …’
For a moment she could hardly breathe. Emotion twisted her insides. At last she nodded. ‘When was she here?’
‘Well, she came for an audition—it would be, oh, spring three years ago; I’ve a good memory for faces and names.’ Marchmont looked at her curiously. ‘She was pretty, as I said, but she moved on after a couple of months to Dr Barnard’s.’
Three years ago. ‘Does this Dr Barnard run a theatre, then?’
Marchmont had hesitated. ‘He runs a stage show. Of sorts.’
So now, at Dr Barnard’s famous Temple of Beauty, Rosalie prepared herself to endure the company of the half-drunken roués upstairs. But as soon as Dr Barnard appeared and observed her there, she would slip down to his office to see if his secret book went back to the summer of 1813, when Linette might have worked here—and met Katy’s father.
Chapter Four
‘Look, lads, it’s Captain Stewart! He was one of Wellington’s officers at Waterloo!’
Alec Stewart was all set to leave the Temple of Beauty. There was no sign of his brother; Garrett must have been wrong. But now these friends of Lord Harry Nugent’s had clustered around him in the smoke-filled bar, blocking his exit.
Alec made a half-hearted effort to answer their eager questions, but he was tired of battle talk. He wanted to point out to these young blades that war was a damnable business, then get the hell out of here. But then Harry himself appeared and accosted Alec with delight.
‘So you decided to come after all, Alec! Weren’t the girls just wonderful?’
‘They were about as I expected, yes,’ said Alec steadily. This wasn’t the place or time to explain to Harry that actually he thought they looked greedy and desperate. Though not quite all. His eyes had been tugged reluctantly back to the stage by just one of the goddesses—Athena—the slender one who tossed her long fair hair and looked almost angry, as though she hated being there amongst those plump, painted courtesans …
For God’s sake, man. She has to be a courtesan, too!
‘Must go, Harry,’ Alec said. But Harry was babbling in his ear, to make himself heard above the general din.
‘You’re not leaving yet, are you, Alec? You must stay for the dancing upstairs.’ Harry was pointing eagerly to one of the many winding staircases that threaded through this tall, ancient building. ‘You could have your pick, if they knew who you were!’
‘Really not my style.’ Alec clapped the curly-haired young man lightly on the shoulder. ‘I only came because I thought my brother might be here—and he’s not. Enjoy the rest of your birthday and don’t let yourself be fleeced too badly, will you?’ Alec started towards the exit.
‘But, Alec, your brother is here!’
Alec ground to a halt. ‘What?’
‘He was too late for the show, but he went straight upstairs to the Inner Temple to take a look at the girls on offer there … Alec? Alec, if you’re going up there, too, don’t forget you’ll have to get a ticket first!’
Alec, already making for the stairs, swung back. ‘I’m not going to be paying for my pleasure, believe me.’
‘But you need a ticket to get in! Look, you can buy one over there!’
Damn. Alec could see the queue snaking along one of the passageways. But—Stephen was here. And this was a matter—a family matter—that could not be put off any longer.
‘And so, you see, sir,’ Rosalie was saying earnestly, ‘that the education of young women is absolutely vital to the future of social enlightenment, wouldn’t you agree? By education, I mean, of course, not just needlework and a little French, but a full grounding in mathematics, the sciences …’
The young buck who’d waited so eagerly for a dance and possibly more with the extremely striking new blonde goddess was beginning to look distinctly alarmed. He muttered hastily, ‘Just remembered. There’s this fellow I’ve got to see …’
With narrowed eyes Rosalie watched the man hurry off across the crowded room towards the door. Five customers had so far bought tickets from the footman at the door to dance with her. Five customers had beaten a rapid retreat as soon as they decently could, thanks to her unexpected—and unwelcome—topics of conversation. Rosalie held up five fingers to Sal and mouthed, ‘Enough?’
Sal, busy coping with the attentions of a drunken admirer in a loud plum coat, nodded and whispered back, ‘Certainly is—thanks!’
Rosalie heaved a sigh of relief. She’d got Sal out of trouble and had managed to scare all her admirers to death within moments. Now all she had to do was wait for Dr Barnard to appear, then she could change out of this ridiculous outfit, slip down to his office, check his green book and get out of here. Mrs Barnard shouldn’t be a problem; the old harridan was still playing the pianoforte with clunking determination, while couples waltzed and groped their way around the floor. Though Rosalie decided to move out of her line of sight, into an alcove away from the light of the candles, just to be on the safe side.
But someone was blocking her way. ‘Oh!’ Her hand flew to her throat.
For a fleeting moment, some faint physical resemblance made her think of the Captain. But even as her pulse started to race, she realised this man was older and not as tall, with a fleshier face and just a hint of a weak chin. And his clothes were—expensive. His coat was of bottle-green kerseymere, his cuffs were edged with lace and a diamond-studded silver pin nestled in the folds of his cravat. The rather strong scent of citrus cologne clung to him.
‘My dear girl,’ he said, ‘I do apologise if I startled you—that wasn’t my intention in the least. I wonder, would you do me the very great honour of dancing with me?’
‘As a matter of fact,’ she said quickly, ‘I was just about to leave.’
A shadow of something—was it anxiety?—crossed his face. ‘And I respect your wishes wholeheartedly, but might I mention that there could be a slight problem?’
‘A problem?’
‘Indeed. You see, I was talking to your Dr Barnard on the stairs only a moment ago. He’s just returned to his office for more tickets for his doormen. But he’ll be arriving here any minute; since I’ve paid him personally for a dance with you, he would be a little angry, I fear, to discover that you’d slipped away.’
Rosalie’s heart sank. So it still wasn’t safe to get into Dr Barnard’s office—bother. She swallowed. ‘Yes. I see …’
‘I’ll tell you what,’ offered the man. ‘Instead of dancing, I’ll fetch you a glass of wine, shall I?’
‘I would prefer lemonade,’ she interrupted quickly. ‘And I really cannot stay long.’
‘I am honoured to be given even a few minutes of your time,’ he said softly. ‘You can’t believe how eager I am for this chance to get to know you.’
Alec frowned as the footman took his ticket and waved him into the Inner Temple. The candle-lit room was filled with gaudy splashes of colour, thanks to the cheap gowns of the women and the scarlet and mauve wall-hangings. In one corner an older woman with red-dyed hair played the piano with more determination than skill and a dozen or more couples moved around the floor in a manner that clearly hinted at more intimate encounters. The odours of stale perfume and tobacco assailed his senses.
And there—Alec’s square jaw tightened—there was his brother, Stephen, dressed to the nines as usual and talking to someone Alec couldn’t quite see since Stephen’s back blocked his view.
Alec walked with deceptive nonchalance across the room. People moved out of his way, as they tended to.
‘Stephen,’ he said softly at his brother’s shoulder.
His brother swung round, the blood leaving his face. ‘You,’ he muttered. ‘Always you. What in hell are you doing here?’
‘I’ve come to speak with you, Stephen.’ Alec gazed thoughtfully at his brother. ‘Since you’re too scared to let me into your house, I thought we could have a pleasant little chat right here.’
‘This is hardly the place or time to discuss private business!’
‘Believe me—’ and Alec’s voice was suddenly harsher ‘—I take no pleasure at all in having to step anywhere near the dungheap of your private business. But you give me little option.’
Stephen’s eyes darted round. Quite a few people were watching; some couples had actually stopped dancing to stare. Stephen turned to the person at his side. ‘My dear,’ he said, ‘I do apologise for this gross intrusion.’
And for the first time, Alec realised who Stephen had been talking to.
He cursed under his breath. He hadn’t wanted her to be here. Blue eyes, as he’d thought: turquoise blue. He absorbed the slender delicacy of her figure, the perfect outline of her profile, the way her silver-blonde hair trailed down the silken white column of her graceful neck …
Athena. He felt, for one wild moment, the overwhelming desire to haul her over his shoulder and carry her out of this tawdry place.
