“I find The Grand Palace on the Thames, on the whole, a handsome and congenial place, and I expect to accomplish a good deal of work,” he said pleasantly.
In other words: yes.
“In other words, yes,” Delacorte said.
The duke couldn’t help it: he grinned at him.
“I expect it’s like a buffet, all those young ladies. Like when Helga sets out kippers, bacon, ham, and sausage on Sundays,” Delacorte suggested wistfully.
“If that’s what happens, I’m looking forward to Sunday,” the duke said.
“Too much choice can be a little dangerous, Your Grace,” Delacorte told him. “On my last trip to India—I’ve been importer for some years of remedies from the Orient and the like, you see, and I sell them to apothecaries here in England—I met a bloke who worked for the governor. Had a little headache and was offered a choice of about ten different headache powders, and he couldn’t decide, so he finally closed his eyes and chose one. He woke up three days later naked in the jungle next to a Bengal tiger who was sniffing his genitals. He had no idea how he got there.”
The three other men froze, drinks and cigars halfway to their mouths.
“The whiskers tickled him, you see,” Delacorte explained. “That’s why he woke up.”
“Friends to this day, he and the tiger,” he added into the elongating dumbstruck silence.
“Thank God for whiskers, I suppose,” the duke finally said.
Hardy and Bolt grinned.
“Perhaps it’s better to just let the wife come to you, Your Grace,” said Delacorte. “Sometimes they just show up, like, out of the blue.”
“I think that’s how you get a cat, Delacorte,” Captain Hardy said. “Not a wife.”
* * *
Dear Mama,
Mariana stared at the foolscap and mulled. The quill was in her hand, but she wasn’t yet prepared to write. She imagined saying:
Plans for the Night of the Nightingale are going splendidly! The ballroom has wonderful acoustics, and I think I know just what I’ll sing. We are going to decorate the ballroom like a garden in the moonlight, with flowers, trees, stars, and the moon! We are going to place handbills all over the city! And sell tickets for the show—for four shillings. Almost the cost of an opera box. It will be very exclusive.
Now, I fear I have some disappointing news: the Duke of Valkirk is a dull and unpleasant person. He only speaks a few words at a time and won’t join in any of the games in the sitting room at night. Perhaps because he’s getting old and tired. He has a fine line right across his forehead.
She wouldn’t, of course, write any of that to her mother, who was not free of lines, fine or otherwise, and she had no illusions about escaping that fate herself.
She in fact still hadn’t written anything at all to her mother, and her letter was now nearly a week late.
It was another example of a truth that wasn’t a truth. She wished the duke was anything so benign as dull. He had only to be himself to be considered interesting, and in merely being himself, he had somehow all but eliminated her, the way an ocean engulfs a drop of water.
But Mariana yearned for a confidante. Her circumstances remained roughly as secure as a lifeboat on a sea that could turn stormy at any time. She was very aware she was here on the gentle sufferance of the ladies of The Grand Palace on the Thames until the time came for her to sing, and she was unaccustomed to charity. She’d need to get a message to Giancarlo somehow to let him know to where she’d fled. He might be a bit of a rogue, but as a composer and director, he knew talented sopranos were not so thick on the vine that he could afford losing one to tar and feathers. Or starvation.
And before the ladies went through the trouble of printing handbills and placing them in the finest establishments on Bond Street, in Grosvenor Square and St. James’s Square, and all about the Italian Opera House, there was a little matter of reputation repair. Otherwise the little audience that had been underneath her window the other night might show up at The Grand Palace on the Thames.
“Have you anyone who might be willing to speak on your behalf? Someone the newspapers might find newsworthy? Perhaps someone with a title, or, er . . . a certain stature?”
Lord Bolt had asked this during the planning meeting they’d held yesterday afternoon, before the arrival of the duke. He’d had more than a little experience with renovating a reputation.
A number of titled men liked to congregate backstage after performances, but she personally knew only four of them. Two of them had shot at each other, ostensibly because of her, the third was Lord Bolt, and the fourth was the Duke of Valkirk, who had already court-martialed her in the tribunal of self-righteousness.
“Madame LeCroix?” she suggested, tentatively. “I sang alongside her in a production last year, and we got on well. She was kind to me.” Madame LeCroix had since retired from the stage, but was still much admired and respected in London for her charitable works. How charitable the retired diva might be toward a young one caught up in a scandal was anyone’s guess.
“I shall send a message to Madame LeCroix,” Lord Bolt said.
How had it come to this?
She longed to unburden her heart to someone, to anyone. But she could not think of anyone quite like her, and that was the problem. Society did tend to like its categories and labels, and there was no place into which she comfortably notched. One couldn’t be “a bit of a whore,” for instance, any more than one could be “a little bit pregnant.” One either was, or one wasn’t.
She was a singularity. She was feeling her way in the dark, and the dark was littered with pitfalls that looked like delights and delights that turned out to be terrible pitfalls.
She stared at the foolscap and daydreamed words onto it.
Dear Mama,
I hope this letter finds you well.
It’s partly true, what they said in the newspaper. I felt I ought to tell you.
I have always tried very hard to be good. But he was very handsome, and a lord, and he said to me things like “beautiful” and “bewitching.” I think lords learn those words at Eton because they think they’ll work on women like me, and as it turns out, they’re right.
Sometimes, I wish I didn’t remember how our family used to be in our rooms over the shop, because that life was the aria, and everything since feels like just its echo. I suppose I felt very alone, which is why it all happened. I like to think I have learned a lot about men, but I worry I only know how to manage them. Perhaps that’s all I’ll ever need to know. I don’t suppose I will ever get a glimpse inside a man’s heart. I think I would know if I had. Wouldn’t I know? How do you know?
I also sometimes wish I didn’t now know how much I enjoy kissing and—well, everything else. But I do. (Moreover, I’m good at it.) But it’s like a duel, I suppose. Not something one ought to do without a good reason. Ha. At least I now know.
It did not make anything better.
I did not understand that pride, temper, and champagne could make men so apt to shoot each other.
It all happened so quickly.
And I swear to you on Papa’s grave that I only went to a gaming hell once, and the pelisse was a gift, not a payment.
She sighed and put the quill pen down. She wouldn’t be writing the letter tonight, either. That much was clear.