Pleasure for Pleasure

Page 51

“I’m sure you are a trial to him.”
“He despairs, he despairs.” The door to the carriage swung open.
Darlington lived in a small house on Portman Square. Griselda didn’t know what she expected: an apartment, probably. After all, he was the third son of a duke, and penniless, by all accounts. But it was a sweet little house with an elaborately carved arch over a black walnut door. It wasn’t as large as her own house, but it was more charming.
As they walked up the path, an elderly man with stern eyes opened the door and bowed stiffly.
“Thank you, Clarke,” Darlington said, taking Griselda’s pelisse himself and handing it to the butler.
Griselda felt more and more confused. Did young bachelors have butlers? Apparently so.
“We’ll have tea in my study,” Darlington told Clarke.
Did young bachelors serve tea to women who had entered their house for a less than respectable purpose? Apparently they did, because she found herself walking sedately before Darlington, for all the world as if she were going to tea with a duchess.
The walls of Darlington’s study were painted a dark crimson color. There were no pictures on the walls, for the simple reason that every wall was covered with books. Griselda’s mouth almost fell open. Of course, she’d seen books. Rafe had a reasonable number of books in his study, though she’d never seen him actually reading one. And certainly there were books in her house. But here books lined the walls, and stacks sat on the floor. There were books on the large desk and books on the armchairs.
“I gather that you are a great reader?” she asked.
“’Tis one of my faults,” Darlington said.
Griselda trailed a gloved finger over the spines of the books closest to her. They weren’t the sort of books she would have expected. Rafe had rows of classics in his study, all bound up in leather and dating back a few centuries, if the dust that fell from them was any indication.
Darlington had rows and rows of…how to put it? Books that the servants read. Books that she read with secret pleasure. Books from lending libraries. The kind that had titles like Nocturnal Revels and the Malefactors’ Bloody Register. Books about murder. His desk had stacks of the same. She picked one up.
“I read this,” she said, glancing over her shoulder as she opened the flyleaf of Herbert Croft’s Love and Madness. “A most affecting story. All those letters between Martha Ray and her murderer.”
“Cross made them up,” Darlington said, coming to her shoulder.
“That’s hardly the point, is it? Of course the author made up the letters. But they were so affecting.”
“How so?”
Griselda tucked herself into a chair. He was standing entirely too close to her, and it made her pulse race. “The argument that the murderer—what was his name?”
“James Hackman.”
“That’s right. When he was trying to convince Martha to leave her lover, the Earl of Sandwich, he was remarkably convincing in saying that she wasn’t Sandwich’s property. Of course,” she added hastily, “it’s all remarkably scandalous and she was a loose woman.”
Darlington came over and leaned on the back of her chair. She felt him pick up a strand of her hair. “Loose women,” he said dreamily. “How we love them. Of course, Hackman fell so much in love that he grew to hate her.”
“You imply that he killed her from hatred,” Griselda said. “I think he killed her because he couldn’t bear to have her in the world, and himself not in a room next to her. I think he simply couldn’t countenance their separation any longer.”
“You have a romantic soul.”
“No. But I have spent a great deal of time watching people in the ton create indiscretions.”
“While creating none such yourself.”
Until today, Griselda thought, wondering again at herself. She tilted back her head and looked up at him. There he was: all tawny masculinity, that lean face and eyes that looked older than he was. “People make fools of themselves when they’re in love—or in passion.”
“Are you?”
“That’s a blunt question. I do not consider myself a fool.”
“Thus you are not in love.”
She almost shut her eyes against his beauty. “Certainly not!”
“I begin to believe that I am.”
Griselda blinked at him. “You are—”
“In love. With you. Not that you need fear that I shall take a pistol to your heart as poor Hackman did.”
“You are as mad as Hackman, then,” Griselda said. He bent over the chair, and his hair fell over his brow. She couldn’t stop herself and reached a hand up to his cheek.
“Do you know what Martha looked like?” he asked.
“No.”
“Not like you. She was a member of the demimonde, the notorious mistress of an earl. She had a cleft chin.”
“I don’t.”
He tapped a finger on her chin. “No, you don’t. That’s a perfectly round little chin that I see before me. And Martha had dark hair.”
Griselda couldn’t help smiling. It was an odd thing to know that the gentleman before you was as aware as you were that your hair was fair by nature…because it was fair all over her body.
“It’s said that she had bright, smiling eyes and a warm, open countenance.”
“Who said that?” Griselda asked.
“Westminster Magazine. April of 1779.”
“How on earth—”
“Would you believe me if I told you I was a scholar?”
“Not for a moment,” Griselda said, smiling at him. She knew scholars. Why, Rafe’s own brother was a scholar, and a Cambridge professor at that. “Can you read ancient Aramaic?”
“What’s that?”
“I believe it’s the language the Bible was written in,” Griselda said.
“I had the sort of education that leads me to believe the Bible was written by an Englishman, in an Englishman’s language.” He dropped her hair and was just sliding a warm hand down her arm when the door opened and his butler arrived with a tea tray.
“It feels odd to be serving tea to you,” Griselda said a few seconds later. “Rather as if I am a maiden aunt on a visit.” They were sitting opposite each other, and she was pouring from an exquisite blue teapot.
He bellowed with laughter at that. “You don’t look like a maiden aunt of my acquaintance,” he said wolfishly.
She felt herself turning pink, but still had to say it. “Yet I’m so much older than you are.” She put a lump of sugar in his cup and handed it to him. “I truly feel as if my age makes this both remarkably improper and, in some odd way, more proper. After all, I am far too old to be having an impetuous affair.”
“With a younger man,” he said, his eyes teasing her over his teacup.
“One hates to think what people would say about me.” It was a relief to say it, rather than have the niggling silent shame of it under her breastbone.
“I expect they’d say you were desperate.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Distasteful.”
“Desperate, with an appetite for beauty.”
Griselda put down her teacup a bit sharply. “Worse and worse.”