Captain Hardy had spent the first half of his life running smugglers to ground. Delilah was glad her husband wasn’t around to witness this. And now they would have to explain the matter to Dot without crushing her initiative.
Poor Dot, who had begun her life as the worst lady’s maid in the world to a duchess, albeit an evil one, was now buying stolen goods near the docks.
The handkerchiefs pulsed wickedly and temptingly before their eyes. It was no good. They simply remained enchanted with their idea of giving them away.
“I’m so torn,” Delilah whispered to Angelique that night. “What does it mean that I’m both horrified and amused that we might be giving our guests back their own handkerchiefs?”
Angelique was quiet.
“We shouldn’t like them to go to waste,” she said carefully.
Delilah bit back a smile. “Moral decline is a slow but slippery slope, Angelique.”
“At least we’ll have each other for company on our slide down.”
Delilah stifled a laugh. “We can hardly sell them back, or find their rightful owners. Perhaps we’ll accidentally return them to their rightful owners.”
“Perhaps it was providence that a stack of stolen handkerchiefs appeared today.”
“Just like the appearance of Miss Wylde.”
They laughed with just the tiniest bit of muffled hysteria. They knew their ambitions for their program slightly overflowed their abilities to get it all done in a month.
“I wonder what the duke would say. Is it honorable to take something just because we want it?”
And they were both quiet. They’d both done exactly that at least once. The fact that they had both acquired husbands who had shown up at The Grand Palace on the Thames at different times was proof of that. However, it had hardly come easily to either of them.
Certainly not as easily as these handkerchiefs.
“We’ll give them a good laundering first, shall we?” Delilah said finally. “And . . . perhaps we won’t tell Captain Hardy. No need for him to, ah, suffer over it, too.”
Mr. Delacorte had promised Mariana that he’d safely delivered her message right into the neatly manicured hand of Mr. Giannini. “Pleasant bloke!” he’d said, cheerfully.
Bless his heart, he was willing to believe most people were pleasant. Which, she knew, had more to do with Delacorte than with other people.
“He can be,” she agreed with a sigh. But Giancarlo hadn’t appeared at The Grand Palace on the Thames with her money yet.
Mariana had begun to feel nostalgic for the milling, dirty streets around Haymarket, and the theater itself. The sky-blue boxes, the flowing red curtains, all those eyes beaming down upon her, all those ladies in brilliant silks and satins studding the curving boxes and balconies of the theater like jewels in a crown. The crowds jostling each other on the benches. Wax from the thousands of candles overhead dripping down on poor and wealthy alike. Feeling the song move through her body as she released it into the theater, feeling the audience stir as it filled the ears and hearts and bodies of those listening.
And yes, the handkerchiefs, those white flashes she saw in the crowd, rising to dab eyes.
She knew she possessed a rare talent; she was unsure whether she considered it a calling, or whether she would even have missed it if life had progressed in the way she’d once hoped for. But she’d come to realize that the only place she truly felt powerful and safe was in the midst of song. She rather wished she could retreat into one and live there for a bit now. To be the one with all the power.
Rather than the one who was beset by a shocking, faint agony at the notion that the duke might soon choose a wife from that stack of invitations.
She sat at her little writing desk, unable to think clearly enough to study her words or write her sentences. Held fast by something that felt nearly like panic, or perhaps urgency, like a fine needle driven right down through the center of her.
Surely he was lonely. He’d been widowed for five years.
And she knew that despite his respect for her, and despite their accord, and despite his, daresay, present kindness that had nothing of condescension in it, there was in fact an ocean-sized gulf between their stations in life. That signet ring he wore might as well be a crown.
But in other fundamental ways, they were very alike.
Which was why the agony was offset by a glimmer of something that left her breathless. As though they comprised a miser’s hoard, she sifted through her impressions: the way his eyes kindled when she appeared in his doorway each day. The way he looked at her during silences, taking note of her features the way she noted his. The way, yesterday, he had been utterly nonplussed by her sentence. He must have guessed what she’d written.
And therein lay the glimmer.
It seemed, in this moment, that her life depended on following it to whatever the conclusion might be.
Valkirk found that Miss Wylde was unusually subdued the next day, following their usual exchange of “Buonasera’s.”
So was he.
He’d kept his head down as she’d approached.
He understood now that she moved like a woman who understood the kind of pleasure her body was capable of giving and receiving. She brought sensuality into the room with her every day like a perfume. It lingered long after she left.
This was why he’d appreciated her entrances so thoroughly.
He promptly assigned her the task of translating five English sentences into Italian while he addressed an urgent inquiry about repairs to the roof of a property he owned in Northumberland. The room was quiet, apart from the scratching of quills on foolscap.
He pointedly did not draw curves of any kind on his.
Mainly because the curves remained in his mind and right in front of him.
She finished first. He could feel her eyes on him. He could also almost feel her formulating a question, which both amused him and made him a little wary.
“You seem to have many invitations, Your Grace. You must be quite popular.”
“Indeed,” he said shortly. He continued writing.
“What a torment it must be for the mamas of the ton to have a widowed duke of reasonable age just roaming free. Is it honorable to inflict such suffering upon them?”
“I am indeed ‘spoiled for choice,’” he said, grimly amused by the entirety of her sentence. He gave the last three words a sardonic lilt. Spoiled for choice. He wished he didn’t remember so clearly that this was how she’d described the handsome Lord Revell.
“Are you going to choose one?”
“Refuse,” he said at once, distractedly.
He caught the flash of her tiny smile out of the corner of his eye. A bit like a shooting star darting past a window.
A long silence followed.
“No doubt you’ll fall in love with just the right one when that time comes.”
He tensed. He recognized that little sentence, with its loaded “l” word, for the stepping stone it was. She was laying a conversational path of sorts that he could walk down.
If he chose.
“Your faith in my judgment upon such short acquaintance is very touching, Miss Wylde. But ‘falling in love,’ as you put it, is hardly necessary for a successful marriage.”
He could sense in the silence that followed a number of things she was tempted to say.