Читать книгу Rules For Being A Mistress - Tamara Lejeune - Страница 8

“Is it murder?” Ajax Jackson wanted to know.

The two women had awakened the manservant with a bucket of cold water. The massive, wall-eyed Irishman was not entirely sober, but neither was he entirely drunk. His iron-gray hair hung down his back in rivulets. Fortunately, he had fallen asleep in his clothes.

“Murder, indeed!” Nora Murphy scoffed. “And ourselves without a bog handy?”

“There’s a river, woman,” he told Nora. “A river’s as good as a bog.”

Nora rolled her eyes. “The Avon River is not the sort of river you can just toss a body in whenever it suits you. It’s not the Liffey! Sure the people would take notice of a corpse splashing around in the Avon River.”

“Just get him out of here, please,” Cosy said wearily. She stood at a distance, holding the cat in her arms. The naked Englishman looked so harmless in his sleep that she wasn’t even sure she was still angry. She was beginning to think this was all her fault. Perhaps she had flirted with him just a little too hard, given him too much to drink. She knew she had been showing off for him, singing in Italian like a hussy! What was he supposed to think, the poor man, when she turned on the charm like that? If they didn’t get him out of her kitchen soon, she would be down on her knees, waking him up to beg his pardon. Unthinkable!

“We’ll hand him a nice beating first, of course,” Nora said eagerly.

“While he’s drunk?” Jackson sneered. “He’d think it was patty fingers with all the blood running in his eyes. Now, if your brothers were here to defend you, Miss Cosy, they’d geld him for your sake, and he’d wake up with his cullions in his mouth.”

“Ugh!” said Cosy, revolted.

“Too much blood,” said practical Nora. “We could tar and feather him, I suppose.”

“And ourselves without any tar? We could bridle him,” Jackson suggested.

Cosy looked interested. “Bridle him? I never heard of that.”

“May God preserve your innocence, child,” said Nora. “You force the iron bit of a bridle into the unsavory mouth of him. That way his tongue may acquire a touch of civility.”

That sounded like a fair compromise. “Have we got a bridle?” Cosy asked.

“We have not,” Jackson said angrily. “And, if you are determined to spare him, Cosy Vaughn, then there’s nothing to do but take him to the middle of nowhere, and leave him there to die like the low-down, dirty blackguard that he is.”

“And where are we supposed to find the middle of nowhere in this Godforsaken place?” Nora wanted to know. “Sure the English are packed in Bath city like seeds in a sunflower.”

“There’s the park,” Cosy suggested. “No one ever goes there but ourselves.”

“Sure the English do prefer promenading themselves in the Pump Room,” Nora sniffed.

“The park!” Jackson cried in disgust. “Sure the Watch would find your man safe and sound in the morning, if that matters to you! You might as well tuck him up in bed like a baby!”

“I don’t like it any more than you do!” Cosy said crossly. “If we were at home, he’d go straight into the bog, but we’re not at home, and he can’t stay here.”

Although it was but a paltry vengeance in his opinion, Jackson obediently carried the baronet out by the tradesman’s door, and returned from the park not twenty minutes later. To his surprise, the young lady was still up, pacing the kitchen and wringing her hands.

“Did you tie him up, nice and tight, to a tree?” she asked anxiously.

“I did not,” he replied, highly pleased with himself. “With a bit of luck, he’ll wake up and go traipsing through the streets of Bath crying for his mother in his shameless nudity. ’Tis how Ned Foley met his end in Drogheda. Drunk as he was, he never saw the cart coming, and the next thing he knew, he was under the hooves of it, trampled like the grapes of wrath.”

“Are you mad, you bollocks? Go and tie him up at once before he wanders off and does himself a harm,” Cosy angrily commanded.

“Is it sweet on him she is?” Jackson grumbled as she swept off to bed.

“Sweet on him?” cried Nora. “And he offering to ravish her twice a week, poor child!”

“Twice a week is not very affectionate,” Jackson observed. “She’d have the right to expect more attention, even if he is a cold fish of an Englishman. Mind you, that’s an easy class of husband, and that’s five nights’ rest she’d not be getting if she married with an Irishman.”

“He wasn’t after asking her to marry him!”

“Poor lass! Did she want to marry him as much as that?” he asked curiously.

“And if you think so, Ajax Jackson, you know nothing of women!” Nora cried.

“I may know nothing of women, Nora,” he replied. “But I know a fair amount on the subject of men. Sure I happen to be one! He’ll be back,” he said confidently. “And I wouldn’t want to be in Cosy Vaughn’s shoes when he does.”

“He’ll leave town, surely, and never come back,” said Nora nervously.

Jackson laughed. “And if you think so, Nora, me darling, ’tis yourself that knows nothing of men.”

Leaving her open-mouthed, he went to find a bit of rope.

Sir Benedict’s valet saw no reason to alter the morning routine simply because his master had been brought home by the Watch naked and quite insensibly drunk. It was not about punishing the delinquent baronet. It was about maintaining a high standard of service. At precisely six-thirty that same morning, therefore, Pickering entered his master’s room and flung open the bed curtains. Never having suffered the ill effects of a night of drinking himself, he was startled when a small china ornament smashed against the wall, narrowly missing his head.

“Sir Benedict!” he cried in amazement.

“Must you be so loud?” Benedict demanded, sitting up in the big four-poster bed.

Sitting up was the worst mistake he could have made. A threshing machine inside his head was instantly set in motion. Its razor-sharp blades began making hay of his brain. Certain that he was dying, though not quickly enough, Benedict fell back in bed and lay paralyzed.

“Good morning, Sir Benedict,” Pickering said sunnily.

Benedict winced. To his sensitive ears, his valet’s voice sounded like the voice of an angry God. The threshing blades in his head rattled violently. He did not dare move, but the desire to be released from his present torment was so strong that he risked speaking again.

“Pickering,” he whispered, scarcely opening his lips. “My will is with my attorney in London. You have much to gain if you kill me. Kill me now, I beg of you.” He burrowed down into the bedclothes and rode the gently lapping waves of nausea back to deep sleep.

Pickering returned late in the evening and lit some candles. Benedict complained that the light hurt his eyes, but, after a little cajoling, he was able to sit up and drink a cup of beef tea. “What happened to me, Pickering?” he asked presently. “Everything is all jumbled in my head. There was—Was there a woman?”

“Yes, Sir Benedict,” Pickering grimly replied. “I’m sorry, sir.”

Benedict sank into the pillows. “Don’t be. She was very beautiful. She liked me enormously, I think. We forged a bond that few can boast. Pickering, I love her.”

Somehow Pickering managed to overcome the strong urge to roll his eyes. “Yes, sir. I’m sure you do, sir. Would you care to bring charges against her?”

“Now, what was her name?” Benedict mused.

A few seconds passed before he exclaimed, “Charges! What do you mean?”

With unwholesome relish, Pickering explained that the beautiful woman had not liked him enormously, or even a little. In fact, as proof of her contempt, she had robbed him of everything, including his clothes, and then had left him tied to a tree in the park, innocent of all clothing, for the Watch to find. Most likely, she was part of a gang of vicious robbers. She had only pretended to like him so that she and her accomplices could rob him.

According to the constable of the Watch, a very knowledgeable and zealous custodian of the law, it was the oldest trick in the book. It was called “The Honey Trap.”

At first, Benedict did not believe a word of it.

“I haven’t been robbed,” he scoffed. “What’s-her-name would never do such a thing. You don’t know her as I do, Pickering. And I think,” he added acidly, “one would remember if one had been tied to a tree.”

“The constable has reconstructed your movements of last night,” Pickering informed him. “Evidently, you left a Mr. Fitzwilliam at the York House Hotel, then you walked to Camden Place. Most unwise, Sir Benedict; you ought to have taken a chair. You were an obvious prey for streetwalkers. The woman you met deceived you shamelessly.”

“Streetwalker! She’s the housekeeper here. Red hair? Bit of a dish? Miss Cosy is her name,” he added, suddenly remembering.

Pickering was revolted. “Miss Cozen, more like! The woman was a thief.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Benedict. He suddenly felt naked and betrayed and just a tiny bit foolish. “She seemed so warm, so open, so friendly.”

“Yes, sir,” Pickering said dryly. “It must be necessary in her…line of work to look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it.”

Benedict groaned. “Was she not the housekeeper?”

Pickering shook his head. “There are no female servants here. I dismissed them all. You were discovered just before dawn by the Watch. The thieves had stripped you of everything. They even took the ring from your hand.”

Benedict looked at his hand, almost spilling his tea in the process. His signet ring was indeed gone. He remembered everything up until the moment he had drunk to the Boys of Wexford, who were probably her gang. After that, Miss Cosy, the beautiful, warm, and friendly Irish housekeeper who sang to him in Italian, vanished from his memory like a ghost in sunlight.

“Needless to say, I paid the constable well for his discretion.”

“What? Er…oh, yes. Well done,” Benedict said absently. His thoughts were elsewhere. He hadn’t been beaten and robbed. The little rogue had gotten him drunk, and talked him out of his clothes! He had actually given her everything he had. Worse yet, he had wanted to give her more. “Damn,” he said through clenched teeth. “I must have walked right into her trap like a mewling lamb to the slaughter! And, like a lamb, she fleeced me, did she not?”

“Yes, sir. Though she must have had help tying you up.”

“Yes, of course she had help,” he snapped. “I should have known it was all too good to be true! My watch! My ring! I had a thousand pounds in my wallet—but never mind that! Are you all right, my old friend?” he asked Pickering. “You seem unharmed.”

Pickering was surprised, and touched. It was just like his master to think of others at a time when he might be excused for wallowing in their own misfortunes. He could almost forgive Sir Benedict for fouling up so spectacularly. “I was a trifle shaken up, Sir Benedict, of course, but my nerves are holding up very well. I thank you.”

Benedict looked around the bedroom. It seemed amply filled with silver candlesticks and there were no blank squares on the walls where paintings had once been. “They did not burglarize the house at all?” he asked, showing a belated concern for Lord Skeldings’s property.

“Oh, no, Sir Benedict,” Pickering assured him. “The house was quite untouched.”

“The other servants? All well? No one hurt?”

“Some shock more easily than others, but, all in all, fine.”

Benedict sighed with relief. “I am glad. If I had been the means of injuring his lordship’s property or his servants, I would have been grieved, indeed. For myself, I am resigned never to see my thousand pounds again, and, I daresay, all my clothes will find their way to a secondhand shop. However, it may be possible to recover my ring, and my watch, too,” he went on thoughtfully. “It would be more profitable for the thieves to sell them back to me, rather than take the trouble of melting down my ring for its gold content or rubbing out the inscription on my watch. I shall offer a reward. ‘Gentleman seeking lost property. No questions asked.’ One sees such items in the newspapers from time to time. See to the advertisement, Pickering. And let us never mention this regrettable matter again.”

“Oh, Sir Benedict!”

Benedict looked at him in astonishment. “Pickering! You are not crying?”

Taking out his handkerchief, the manservant blew his nose. “It is all my fault,” was his anguished cry. “I am to blame!”

“You, Pickering? How so?”

“I have neglected your loins quite shamefully,” Pickering explained, his long nose quivering with emotion. “Can you ever forgive me?”

“My dear fellow! Neglect them all you like. In fact, I prefer it.”

“No! They have been neglected too long, Sir Benedict,” said Pickering firmly. “They demand immediate attention.”

“No, they don’t.”

“You need relief, Sir Benedict!” Pickering insisted. “When a gentleman is reduced to applying to streetwalkers for the fulfillment of his carnal needs—!”

“She was not a streetwalker!” Benedict objected. For some reason it disturbed him to hear that conniving little minx maligned in any way. “She was a thief, Pickering, and a good one. She had beauty and charm, and she knew how to use them to her advantage. I thought I was past the weaknesses of my youth. She made me feel young and stupid again. You’ve no idea how much I hate feeling young,” he added bitterly. “That bitch!”

“She ought to be hanged, if you ask me,” Pickering sniffed.

Benedict scowled. “No one is asking you. Now, be good enough to ready me a hot bath. After such an adventure, one feels ever so slightly redolent.”

As far as Benedict was concerned, the subject was closed.

Pickering obediently went to draw his master’s bath. When he returned to the bedroom, Benedict was sitting on the edge of the bed with his bare feet on the floor. Pickering considered this progress. Now, if he could just get his master to see reason.

“Mortification of the flesh is all very well, Sir Benedict,” he said severely, “but the only real way to be free of temptation is to give in to it.”

Benedict groaned. “Yes, that is what the Church of England teaches us.”

Pickering was unperturbed; his master had never shown anything but the most cursory interest in what the Church of England taught. “This will come as a shock to you, Sir Benedict—it certainly shocked me! But there is a class of woman that we can employ to help us to purge ourselves of these…inconvenient humors. I have learned that a Mrs. Price in the Registry Office here in Bath has a number of Prime Articles in her keeping.”

By all outward appearances, the Registry Office in Gay Street was a respectable employment agency. Pickering had learned of Mrs. Price’s less than respectable activities only a few hours before, from the constable of the Watch, who received a small stipend from the aforementioned for sending customers her way. “Needless to say, her clients are all gentlemen of the highest character. She doesn’t waste her time on the riffraff. And the girls are very high quality. As good as anything one can get in London, I am persuaded. I beg of you, sir, for the sake of your health, let me make an appointment for you.”

Benedict answered him with a look of strong disapproval. “Pickering, you astonish me. Do you mean prostitutes?”

Pickering’s face fell. “You’ve heard about them already?”

“Pickering! You are addressing a member of British Parliament!”

“Of course, Sir Benedict,” Pickering said contritely. “Didn’t it help at all?”

Benedict was indignant. “For the love of God! After slavery, prostitution may be the greatest social evil of our time. In fact, it is a form of slavery, a particularly disgusting form of slavery, in which a woman, unable to support herself by any other means, is forced to sell her body to strangers. A gentleman, Pickering, does not use prostitutes. A gentleman,” he said piously, “keeps a mistress. You see the difference. How could you possibly think that I would be interested in such a thing? I am deeply offended!”

“Mrs. Price’s girls are not all prostitutes, if that is what troubles you,” Pickering assured him. “I have had a long conversation with the footman about it. Some of them are quite respectable married women from the counties. They just do it to make a little money from time to time. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?”

“Oh, my God,” Benedict said violently.

Pickering tried a new tact. “If you will not do it for yourself, think of your poor wife. I believe it was Aristotle who said that a man should approach his wife discreetly, lest the pleasure of being fondled too passionately should transport the poor creature beyond the bounds of reason. You do not want to take her ladyship by storm, after all. Better to get it out of your system now.”

“Have you been drinking?” Benedict demanded.

Pickering went on doggedly. “If it is your health that concerns you, Mrs. Price’s girls will not infect you with a social disease. They won’t rob you or blackmail you. That’s the Price guarantee: honest girls at an honest price. She can get you any kind of female you would like.”

This elicited something between a snarl of pain and an explosion of derisive mirth from the baronet. “Is that so, Pickering? Can she get me…I don’t know…a tall, slender Irish girl with tangled red hair, green eyes, perfect skin, good teeth, small, high breasts, and a laughing mouth?”

“I don’t see why not, sir.”

“While you’re at it, have her sing to me in Italian! Can your Mrs. Price find me a girl like that?” Laboriously, he climbed to his feet. The room tilted and swayed around him. “No, don’t help me,” he said sharply as his valet started toward him.

“I can prepare you a cure, if you like,” Pickering offered as his master limped past him into his dressing room. “My father’s recipe.”

“No,” Benedict said firmly. “I drank my bottle, and now I must suffer for it.” He looked around him in distaste. The dressing room was a six-sided chamber with a mirrored door set into every wall. He had come through the first door. Four of the other doors concealed closets while behind the fifth a steaming Roman-style bathing pool awaited him. Lord Skeldings, apparently, had spared no expense on his Bath home. The bathing chamber was equipped with up-to-date plumbing, with hot water piped in.

“Cover these mirrors,” Benedict uttered in distaste. The last thing he wanted was six full-length views of his mortal body. He walked through to the bathroom.

After his bath, he was able to sit next to the fire for a few hours. His entire body ached. For dinner he managed to eat a plate of the injustly famous Bath olivers. The oliver was a dry digestive biscuit developed by Bath’s own celebrated Dr. Oliver. Perhaps they tasted better when washed down with the foul-tasting water on offer in the Pump Room.

Pickering brought him the Bath papers, neatly folded into small sections, which made it easier for Benedict to manage the flimsy newsprint with his one hand. Ordinarily, he never glanced into the society columns, but, then, ordinarily, he was not on the lookout for a wife. The sooner he got married, the better. Then he could go back to his happy way of life, which did not include reading the society columns.

He found himself wondering what Miss Cosy might be doing at that moment. Certainly not reading the society columns! Probably, she was enjoying her portion of his thousand pounds. He hoped that her accomplices, whom he imagined to be big, burly men, had not cheated her of her fair share. She had earned it. He did not expect ever to see her again.

“She’s probably halfway to London by now.” He sighed.

“Sir?” Engaged in spreading a shawl over his gentleman’s knees, Pickering looked up.

“I was thinking about the unfortunate young woman who robbed me,” Benedict explained. “She must have been forced by extreme poverty into a life of crime. I have often thought it is a great pity that, outside of marriage, the women of our society have few options in life, other than thievery or, God forbid, prostitution. I would rather she steal from me a little than sell her body to countless men. In her place, I might have done the same.”

“Oh, sir!” said Pickering, appalled. “Not one of your crusades?”

Benedict smiled ruefully. “I have but one crusade in Bath, and that is to find a wife.”

“I have informed myself on the Bath social calendar,” Pickering said eagerly. His interest in who would become Lady Wayborn was, if anything, keener than his master’s. After all, her ladyship would set the tone at Wayborn Hall in the years to come. Pickering hoped she would be kind and beautiful; Sir Benedict would need someone to soften him around the edges. “There is a lecture on the growing threat of Atheism in the Upper Rooms tonight.”

“God, no,” said Benedict, with unintentional irony. “I couldn’t possibly go out tonight. Besides, such a subject would be highly unlikely to attract marriageable young ladies,” Benedict pointed out. “I believe the most prudent course of action would be to retire early, get a good night’s rest, and begin afresh tomorrow.”

With his little silver pencil he began circling the names of promising females in the newspaper column on the table before him. Any name prefaced by a “Miss” received an equal share of his attention.