Читать книгу Regency Rogues and Rakes - Anna Campbell - Страница 32

Observe his fierce, fighting-cock air; his coal-black gipsy curls; his aristocratic (not to call it arrogant) expression of countenance—never laid aside, whether he is smiling on a fair dame or frowning on a fawning dun.

—The Court Magazine,

“Sketches from Real Life,” 1835

London

Thursday 21 May 1835, early morning

The trollops knew how to throw a party.

On Wednesday nights, after dancing or playing cards with Society’s crème de la crème at Almack’s, London’s wilder set continued more eagerly to a very different assembly at the house of Carlotta O’Neill. On offer was a roulette table, along with other games of chance, as well as spicier games with the demireps who played ladies-in-waiting to London’s current queen of courtesans.

Harry Fairfax, Earl of Longmore, was on the scene, naturally.

Carlotta’s wasn’t the sort of place his father, the Marquess of Warford, would wish his twenty-seven-year-old son and heir to frequent, but heeding his parents’ wishes, Longmore had decided a long time ago, was the fast and easy route to murderous boredom.

He was nothing like his parents, on any count. He’d inherited not only his great-uncle Lord Nicholas Fairfax’s piratical looks—black hair, black eyes, and a tall, muscular physique usually associated with buccaneers—but Great-Uncle Nicholas’s talent for Doing What He Was Not Supposed To.

And so Lord Longmore was at Carlotta’s.

And she was draped over him, wafting waves of scent. And talking, unfortunately.

“But you’re intimately acquainted with them,” she was saying. “You must tell us what the new Duchess of Clevedon is really like.”

“Brunette,” he said, watching the roulette wheel spin. “Pretty. Says she’s English but acts French.”

“My dear, we could have found that out from the Spectacle.”

Foxe’s Morning Spectacle was London’s premier scandal sheet. The high-principled Marquess of Warford called it disgusting tripe, but he read it, as did everyone else, from London’s bawds and pimps on up to the Royal Family. Every detail it published regarding the Duke of Clevedon’s new bride had, Longmore knew, been artfully crafted by the bride’s fair-haired sister Sophia Noirot, evil dressmaker by day and Tom Foxe’s premier spy by night.

Longmore wondered where she was this night. He hadn’t spotted her at Almack’s. Milliners—especially slightly French ones—had as much chance of receiving vouchers to Almack’s as he had of turning invisible at will. But Sophia Noirot had her own mode of invisibility, and she was perfectly capable of inserting her elegantly curved body anywhere she pleased, in the guise of a temporary servant. That was how she dug up so much dirt for Foxe’s scandal sheet.

The roulette wheel stopped spinning, one of the fellows at the table swore, and the wench acting as croupier raked a pile of counters in Longmore’s direction.

He scooped them up and handed them to Carlotta.

“Your winnings?” she said. “Do you want me to keep them safe for you?”

He laughed. “Yes, m’dear, keep them safe. Buy yourself a bauble or some such.”

Her well-groomed eyebrows went up.

Until a moment ago, when visions of Sophy Noirot sashayed into his mind, he’d assumed what Carlotta had assumed: that he’d soon disappear with her into her bedroom. She was supposed to be in Lord Gorrell’s keeping, but he, while rich enough, wasn’t quite lively enough to keep Carlotta fully amused.

Dependent on an allowance and gambling winnings, Longmore probably wasn’t rich enough. But while he didn’t doubt he possessed the necessary stamina and inventiveness to hold her interest, it occurred to him now that she wasn’t likely to hold his for more than five minutes. Even by his careless standards, that hardly justified a large financial investment and the subsequent tedium of listening to his father rant about overspent allowances.

In other words, Longmore was tired of her already.

Not too long after abandoning his winnings, he took his leave, along with two of his friends and two of Carlotta’s maids of honor. They found a hackney and after a short discussion, set out for a gaming hell with a very bad reputation, in the neighborhood of St. James’s. There, Longmore could count on a brawl.

Bored with the conversation inside the coach, he turned to gaze out of the window at the passing scene. The sun rose early at this time of year, and though the window was dirty, he could see well enough. A drably dressed female carrying a shabby basket was hurrying along the street. Her pace and dress, along with the basket, made it clear she wasn’t one of London’s numerous streetwalkers but an ordinary female on her way to work at about the time her betters in the beau monde were going home from their parties.

She moved at a fast clip, but it wasn’t fast enough. A figure darted out of an alley, grabbed her basket, and knocked her into the street.

Longmore stood, put down the window, opened the carriage door, and jumped out of the moving carriage, deaf to his companions’ shrieks and shouts. After the first stumble, he quickly gained his balance, and charged after the thief. His prey was fast, darting this way and that. At a busier time of day, he would have soon shed any pursuer. But the hour was early, and hardly anybody stood in Longmore’s way. He wasn’t thinking, only running, in a blind fury. When the fellow sprang into a narrow court, Longmore never thought of ambush or danger—not that he’d care, had he thought about it.

The fellow was making for a door, and it opened a crack, its inhabitants expecting him, no doubt. Longmore got to him first. He grabbed the thief and dragged him backward. The door banged shut.

Longmore slammed him against the nearest wall. The man instantly crumpled and slid to the ground, dropping the basket. Though he couldn’t be much damaged—these villains didn’t break easily—he stayed where he was, eyes closed.

“I shouldn’t get up again in a hurry, if I were you,” Longmore said. “Filthy coward. Attacking women.” Longmore collected the basket and cast a glance round the court. With any luck, dangerous accomplices would hurry to their friend’s rescue.

But no luck. The area was quiet, though Longmore was well aware he was being watched. He sauntered out into Piccadilly.

He found the girl minutes later. She stood slumped against a shop front, weeping. “Never mind the bawling,” he said. “Here’s your precious goods.” He fished some coins from a pocket and thrust those and the shabby basket into her hands. “What in blazes was in your mind, rushing on blindly without minding your surroundings?”

“W-work,” she said. “I had to get to work … your lordship.”

He didn’t ask how she knew he was a lord.

Everybody knew the Earl of Longmore.

“Thieves and drunken aristocrats roaming the streets, looking for trouble, and you without a weapon,” he said. “What’s wrong with women these days?”

“I d-don’t know.”

She was shaking like a leaf. She was bruised and dirty from her fall in the street. She was lucky that none of the scores of drunken louts on their way home from their debauches had run her over.

“Come with me,” he said.

Whether too shaken to think or simply intimidated—he often had that effect, even on his peers—she followed him across the street to the hackney. His friends could have continued on: They were drunk enough. But they’d stopped to watch the fun.

“Everybody out,” Longmore said.

They made noises of protest but they staggered out of the vehicle, all staring at the drab female. “Not your type, Longmore,” Hempton said.

Crawford shook his head. “Standards dropping, I’m afraid to say.”

Longmore ignored them. “Where were you going?” he said to the girl.

She stared at him, then at his friends, then at the tarts.

“Never mind them,” he said. “Nobody’s interested in your doings. We only want to get on to the next party. Where do you want the driver to take you?”

She swallowed. “Please, your lordship, I was on my way to the Milliners’ Society for the Education of Indigent Females,” she said.

“There’s a mouthful,” Crawford said.

“I work there,” the girl said. “I’m going to be late.”

She gave Longmore the direction, which he relayed to the driver, with strict orders to take the girl to her destination in half the usual time, or Longmore would find him and give him an excellent excuse for moving slowly.

He helped the girl up into the coach, slammed the door on her, and waved the driver away.

He thought about milliners.

One milliner, actually, a blonde one.

Leaving his companions to find another hackney, he continued on foot, on his own, the short distance to St. James’s Street. To get to Crockford’s, he had to pass White’s Club on one side of the street, and a very little way farther down, Maison Noirot, lair of French dressmakers.

He passed the dressmakers’ shop, walking slowly. Then he paused and looked back, up at the upper storeys where, for reasons that eluded him, two of the three Noirot sisters still lived.

He continued to Crockford’s, where he proceeded to lose large sums for quite an interesting while before he started to win large sums.

When, after an hour or so of increasing boredom, he left Crockford’s, it was still prodigious early by Fashionable Society’s standards. Nonetheless, London was coming to life. People going up and down St. James’s Street: a few vehicles but mainly pedestrians. The shops hadn’t yet opened.

Maison Noirot, he knew, did not open until ten o’clock, though the seamstresses—a great parade of them these days—all marched in at nine.

Still, over the past few weeks he had acquired a general notion of Sophia Noirot’s habits.

He waited.