Читать книгу Wanton: - Noelle Mack - Страница 8

The next day…

Seduction. There was an art to it. A woman who wished to intrigue a man must present herself just so, preferably seated, her pale hands curved in a silken lap and her hair swept up with artful carelessness as if a lover’s hands could easily let it down. Her smooth neck ought to curve submissively, adorned with only a ribbon or a thin chain. A poor beauty could forgo both and make do with a spiraling kiss-curl, perhaps. But rich or poor, her gaze must be demure and downcast, the brilliance of her eyes shadowed by the gentle angle of her head…followed by a raising of her pretty chin and a heated look upward, lasting no longer than a fraction of a second, through long eyelashes.

There was no man approaching and they were not in a ballroom, but Miss Georgina Lennox managed the trick well enough on her third try. Severin studied her pupil. At nineteen, Georgina did not possess the porcelain-doll beauty of her mother Mary, an actress, but she had potential, fortunately. Mary herself had just married an elderly earl, who’d requested that Georgina, an inconvenient reminder of his wife’s wayward past, be married off as soon as possible. He’d let it be known that a handsome dowry would be settled on the girl.

The new-minted countess, grateful for her escape from the creaking, dusty boards of a Covent Garden theater and sudden elevation to ladyhood, was watching.

“Georgina, you are a gawk,” she said to her daughter. She nodded at Severin. “But she is coming along. It is good of you to take her on.”

Severin only inclined her head, not wishing to embarrass the girl by thanking her mother for paying in advance for instruction. The agreed-upon fee was enough for Severin to live comfortably on for the next year. And it was not the first such assignment she had undertaken.

“I congratulate you on finding an honest way to earn your bread,” Mary said to Severin.

Was that a dig? Severin was not quite sure.

“You have done very well for someone who started out as a modiste, my dear.”

Not a dig, perhaps, but certainly condescending. But true enough. However, Severin had moved up from there to teach the niceties of style, fine speech, and gracious manners for women of the demimonde. She was so good at it that aristocratic women now paid her to work the same magic on their behalf. “Thank you, Mary.”

Her father, an eccentric Englishman, had seen to it that both of his daughters were relentlessly groomed for a worthy marriage. To that education, Severin’s mother had added a knowledge of the secrets of womanly beauty from her Persian maidservant.

“You are good at what you do, Severin.”

She smiled at the countess in reply. “I try my best.”

“Georgina will benefit from your knowledge of London society.”

“I am more of an observer than a member of it.”

“You know everyone, my dear Severin, from those with a precarious first foot on a rung at the bottom of the ladder to the climbers at the very top.”

“I suppose I do.”

“And you are the height of fashion when you want to be.”

“Sometimes I don’t.” Today Severin wore a flowing gown of plain linen, adorned only with a narrow sash of golden silk.

“Well, you have your pick of beautiful gowns.” Mary clucked disapprovingly. “Those vain women who wear them once or never wear them at all! But it is to your advantage. You could pass for a lady any day of the week.”

Severin answered her with a thin smile. She didn’t care if she was taken for a lady or not.

Her singular trade conferred a curious half-invisibility that she found pleasant at times and irksome at others. At balls and assemblies, Severin was sought out by the most dashing men as a dancing partner, but she was ignored in public by most of the women. The most formidable mamas regarded her as unsuitable for their sons and competition for their daughters.

So be it. Her name had been whispered in connection with some fascinating scandals but she made it a point to ignore gossip and do as she pleased. She lived by herself and was happy that way. The one marriage proposal she’d received had come to nothing years ago. Her lovers—and she had not had many, unlike her half-sister Jehane—had been unconventional men. Adventurers. Second sons forced to seek their fortune however they could. Lone wolves, really.

Marko was an intriguing example of the last. She hadn’t been able to find out much about him.

Finding out that the unpleasant man who’d once harassed her and Jehane in the street was his cousin, however distant, had unsettled her at first. Feodor Kulzhinsky—their last names were different and so were their natures. She had come to trust Marko himself in the intervening weeks, torturing him quite pleasantly with genteel conversation. Still, she suspected that Marko had known how much she wanted him all the same.

“May I get up?” Georgina asked, startling Severin out of her reverie. “I am tired of sitting and posing like this. Allow me a minute to be myself.”

Severin laughed. “Certainly,” she replied, but she nonetheless observed the way Georgina walked as she moved about the room. The long-legged girl naturally had a long stride. Severin would have to teach her to place her steps as carefully and as prettily as everything else the girl had been instructed to do.

“I suppose you will tell me how this is done next,” Georgina said.

“You are right,” Severin replied.

“And you must do exactly as she says, my darling daughter.”

“Yes, Mama.”

The countess gave Georgina a disbelieving look. “Are you quite well, my dear? You are too well-behaved at the moment. It is unlike you. Always so mischievous, rummaging through my costume trunks and nicking my things—you only just stopped doing that. And reciting my lines all the while.”

Georgina nodded and did a pirouette. “I still love to deck myself out in tattered finery. But I suppose I will never go on the boards like you. Are those days over, Mama?”

“Indeed yes,” Mary said with great satisfaction. “Thanks to Coyle. It is lovely to have an earl for a husband. We shall never have to worry about another provincial tour or where our next meal is coming from.”

“The reciting did you good,” Severin said to Georgina. “You have a lovely voice and that will be to your advantage.” The way Georgina spoke reminded Severin very much of her half-sister Jehane, in fact. Jehane’s voice was a sensual purr that men found irresistible, her light accent only making matters worse for susceptible male hearts.

Avoiding the piano but bumping into the settee, Georgina stopped at a small oil painting of an odalisque, examining the languid pose of the petal-skinned beauty wrapped up in sumptuous fabric that was not fashioned into a dress. “How lovely she is.”

Severin only nodded, not inclined to reveal that her mother’s servant had modeled for the painting years ago. It had been a particular favorite of her father’s. To English eyes, the painting was only a fantasy, done during a vogue for such things. But the woman in it was real enough to Severin, although she had never seen her mother looking like that. She kept the painting for sentimental reasons, even if Oriental splendor was not currently in fashion in London, along with all of her mother’s possessions, from perfume bottles to furniture.

At the moment, Georgina was promenading up and down the center of a Persian design meant to represent a hidden garden.

“Turn your feet out just a little,” Severin said.

Georgina did, humming to herself. Her mother applauded.

“Very good,” Severin said.

Later, in her own chamber, she sat at a desk inlaid with geometric designs in ebony and mother-of-pearl, writing out a bill for Georgina’s coming sessions. Mary was next to her, settled in a comfortable armchair.

“Wherever did you get that desk?”

“It was shipped from Tashkent with the rest of our things. It used to be in my mother’s room. She valued it highly.”

“That’s why I’ve never seen it. A mysterious female, your mother. No one caught more than a glimpse of her either, not while you and Jehane were girls, according to my sources. Not ever.”

Mary had an unfortunate tendency to pry, especially when she had a glass of whisky in her hand. She took a large swallow and coughed.

“Would you like some water?” Severin asked.

“No, thank you. What was your mother’s name again?”

“Giselle.”

“How very exotic. From Persia, wasn’t she?”

“No. She was French, but raised in Constantinople. Her servant was Persian. There seems to be some confusion on the matter. I cannot imagine who would spread such tales.”

Mary narrowed her eyes. Severin braced herself for the inevitable rude inquiry. “Oh. Aren’t those women raised to do nothing but obey and be beautiful and bear children?” She gulped the last of the whisky. “And someone said that your father bought and paid for her. In gold. Is that true?”

“Who told you that?”

“Don’t be cagey, Severin. Aren’t we friends?”

“Of course.” Severin concentrated on Mary’s bill, adding an extra charge of several guineas for nothing at all.

“Then tell me everything.”

Severin lay her pen down in the slot on the inkwell and blotted the bill meticulously.

“Please?”

She sighed as she handed Mary the slip of paper. “My father traveled a great deal. He was not the only Englishman who acquired a wife abroad and a servant or two into the bargain.”

He’d traded in silks for several companies based in London and Samarkand, and lived like a pasha in Tashkent, to the north.

“Indeed not,” Mary said eagerly. “There’s a fellow who has five beautiful houris under lock and key in his Mayfair house. A factor in the East India Company, he is. And I heard that he keeps a harem in Calcutta too.”

Her father had not been that ambitious. He had started out with a traditional wife, European, and kept a harem of one: Ruksana, her mother’s maid, who died giving birth to another daughter, Jehane. Growing up innocent of how others lived, the two girls thought nothing of their domestic arrangements in Samarkand and, later, Tashkent, until they’d moved to England. They had not been told they were half-sisters for a very long time.

They were as close as twins, and could finish each other’s thoughts before the words that expressed them were spoken. Only when they had left Tashkent to resettle in London, and were permitted the greater liberty of English girls, did they discover that their previous domestic arrangements were regarded as unusual. Even scandalous. Her father’s wealth and eccentricity begged questions wherever they lived.

Severin could not deny that her mother’s servant had been bought and paid for.

Her mother, Giselle, hid herself away from the outside world wherever they lived, an unhappy wife. That her maid had become her rival for her lord and master must have galled her deeply, but Severin had been a baby at the time. Her mother had never mentioned it until the last week of her life.

“The Persian servant was brave to come to London, all the same.”

Dig, dig, dig. Mary was not likely to stop. Severin made no response. She didn’t have to explain that Ruksana was no longer alive.

“Veiled, I expect. I had a costume like that once,” Mary prattled. “Had a devil of a time trying to see out.”

Severin only nodded. She did remember the long voyage over land and sea, and their arrival at the vast and gloomy warehouses of the East India docks. Her father had handled it all. Her mother had been too withdrawn and too miserable to demand much of anything from him by that point.

In some ways Giselle had not been that different from her luckless servant. She obeyed her husband in everything and followed him, accepting her lot as destiny. At least Severin’s father had made over the house he bought in London into an exotic hybrid of East and West, like his wife’s native city of Constantinople. From the outside the house looked like any other. Though he left Giselle well provided for before his untimely death, his daughters did not mourn him overmuch. Grieving, homesick, and loathing London, a city she found grim and ugly from the windows she peeked out of, Giselle had died a year to the day after him, attended by Severin and Jehane in her secluded bedchamber.

“Well,” Mary was saying, “if you have no good gossip to pass along, I shall be on my way. No telling where Georgina has got to. I expect the friend who came for her has dragged her off to a show. That will have to stop until we marry her off, eh? Not respectable.”

“You ought to know,” Severin said dryly.

Mary gave a snort at that remark and patted Severin on the cheek. “You are a sly one, Severin. Ta, then.”

When her friend had collected her extravagant hat and departed, Severin went upstairs.

Within the house, once past the prim and proper, very English rooms on the first floor, the décor changed utterly, as if one was moving through all the exotic worlds her family had left behind. A visitor, although none ever got very far, might pass through room after room tiled with intricate designs, filled with divans and cushions and gorgeous carpets, until the inner sanctum had been reached.

Severin had not altered one thing inside that room, and rarely went in there. On its walls was a most affecting portrait of all three of them: Giselle, Severin, and Jehane, as they had been ten years ago. Blessed with a loving heart, Giselle had never called the orphaned newborn anything but her daughter and found a wet nurse for the infant girl on the day of her birth. She, without family besides them, had often told her girls they were lucky to have each other.

Severin paused on the threshold. It was a room that her mother had seldom left. Thoroughly French and devoutly Catholic though Giselle was, she had possessed an odd gift. Her mother could see into souls, or so Severin thought. It had been impossible for her to keep secrets from the woman whose sad amber eyes followed her everywhere when she stayed indoors. Jehane had been rather better at it, a slyboots even then.

Before her death, on the day on which she’d explained everything as best she could, Giselle had given her oldest daughter the amber pendant that Severin still treasured. She’d shown Marko the flaw deep within its golden depths that looked very like an eye in the right light—an animal’s eye.

“Ruksana gave me this. The eye can see,” her mother had whispered in French. “It will watch over you and your sister when we cannot.”

That day had come too soon. The memory of it was still painful.

Yet, despite her husband’s betrayal, Giselle had believed in love, giving all of hers to her daughters. She’d loved fairy tales and romances and anything magical—they’d been spoiled that way.

London was a merchant’s city, bustling, chaotic, with very little romance about it. The ever-creeping fog softened its hard edges now and then but they were still there underneath. Passionate and impetuous as he was, Marko scarcely seemed to belong here. Then again, neither did she, Severin thought with an inward smile.