Lady Notorious (Royal Rewards #4) Read online

  “Let us never say the word trellis again.”

  “Fine. But it’s true. As I said, men are simple creatures. He was honest with you.”

  “And I left him,” she said numbly. “After he’d told me he thought no one had ever loved him.”

  “Bad timing, that.”

  “It wasn’t right after. But yes, bad timing.” She settled into a less crablike position, still huddled on the floor. “Maybe there’s something wrong with me. Is there?”

  “There’s no question about that.” Charles held up his hands. “Sorry. I’m your brother. I couldn’t let that one pass.”

  And he was happy, and Janey was happy. When had Cass last been happy, reveling in it?

  At Chichester for a night; at the Harroughs’ ball in George’s arms.

  She swallowed, hard, and tried to smile. She would sort out some way of being that happy again on her own. No man in her bed, no one’s arms around her. George had reminded her how she wanted to feel, but she could not rely on him to make her feel that way. She could only rely on herself.

  There she went, not trusting again. Yet experience had taught her it was the safest way to be. That wanting something was a sign to stop, to lock up that urge and focus anew on the shoulds of life.

  But there was a difference between being dependent and being part of a team, just as there was a difference between selfish pride and grace. Charles had sorted that out long before she had. He’d done his work and skived off; he hadn’t let it take over his life.

  And George was worthy of trust. Creditors knew he’d pay his bills. His friend had staked a restaurant on George’s good word and goodwill. He’d brought Charles home with a broken leg and paid the surgeon.

  He’d slid a gold ring onto Cass’s finger and told her he wouldn’t touch her unless she wanted him to. And even now, she wanted him to, and she missed the clasp of warm gold on her hand.

  “You told me,” she said slowly, “that I could do whatever I wanted. That Janey would work at Bow Street with you.”

  “Right.” Charles looked puzzled.

  “Here’s what I don’t want: I don’t want to live with you and Janey after you’re married. And I don’t want to work at Bow Street anymore. I don’t want to keep doing your job, living your life.”

  “I never wanted that for you.” Surprise made Charles appear startled, boyish. “Is that really how you feel?”

  “It is. I’ve been following you about, tidying behind you for all our lives.”

  Charles rolled his eyes. “I never asked you to clean up my messes, Cass. I’d get around to them eventually.”

  “That would carry a lot more weight if you didn’t have a broken leg from the last case we worked together. And when would you clean up your messes, as you called them? When you got blood poisoning from the fall? When you’d overspent your income and we’d been warned we’d be out on the street the next day unless we paid the rent?”

  From the mantel, Grandmama seemed to frown. Which of them she was frowning at, Cass couldn’t tell.

  “You worry too much,” Charles scoffed.

  “And you, not enough. If you care about people, you want to give them what they need. I didn’t need things from you; I needed security. I’d rather have old clothes and money in the bank than empty but new pockets.”

  God, it felt good to say this. Or not good, exactly, but like the peeling away of something bad. Like armor that had grown too tight, had begun to hurt her. She flung it all away.

  And Charles tipped his head, thinking. Listening. Finally, he said, “What do you think Janey needs?”

  Good heavens, he was besotted. “I think you should ask her,” Cass said carefully. “Just as you should tell her what you need. And you should both do your best to give it.”

  “Hmm.” He scratched his head, then nodded.

  “You were happy for me to solve your problems, Charles. You never told me to stop.”

  Now he looked ashamed. “You’d have to search far and long to find a man who wouldn’t let someone else do his work for him. But why did you, Cass?”

  She’d done it for so long, she had almost forgotten why. Or that there was a why, and that it wasn’t simply the way things had to be. “Because I worried. I worried about money and wanted to be sure we had enough. And I worried about your safety and wanted to protect you.”

  “You did it for us.”

  “Yes, in a way. But I also wanted credit. I wanted everyone to know that I was doing a man’s work and making it my own. There are so few ways for a woman to matter.” She sounded wistful. She hated that she sounded wistful.

  She stood, shaking out her skirts. They were rumpled and dirty from when she trekked through London, then sat in a puddle on the floor.

  Charles watched this elaborate process, then looked ruefully at his broken leg. “You matter to me, Cassie. I’d never have amounted to anything if it weren’t for you. But now I think I can go on my own.”

  “With Janey’s help,” Cass said crisply.

  “With Janey’s help,” he granted. “There’s no shame in taking help, as long as I don’t also take it for granted.”

  “No,” she said. “Don’t take it for granted. Any of it.”

  She shouldn’t have taken George’s kindness for granted; she shouldn’t have taken for granted that he would fail her. That he couldn’t mean what he said, and that he cared only for the case, and that it was best if she left before this became all too plain.

  Instead, she expected a pattern: that he would be like the other men in her life. Her father, who had left. Charles, who loved her but took advantage of her, and Fox, whose kindness came with so many burdens.

  But George was none of them. He was just himself, and she missed him like she missed the sight of flowers in the middle of winter. She missed him like the sun during a thunderstorm. It was an aching way of missing, wanting something beautiful outside of its proper time and place.

  And who decided the proper time and place for George, for her life? She alone.

  God. She loved him. She loved him like flowers loved the sun.

  No, she couldn’t be with him every second—just as she’d told him. But like Janey at the theater; like her friend Mags, keeping watch on the Watch: each moment held the possibility of goodness. Nothing was perfect, but a moment together, a moment spared, wasn’t nothing.

  In fact, it was everything.

  Of course her heart hurt; its armor was being broken open. And there were so many possibilities, weren’t there? So many, after all.

  There were other ways to help, to matter, besides working with Charles. Maybe she would find someone who wanted help starting a restaurant. Maybe she would take a case or two for Fox, as a private consultant, and be paid for her efforts at last. Maybe she’d help an artist build a camera obscura.

  Maybe she’d build one herself, and look at the world in a different way.

  She had five pounds in her pocket. She was a woman of resources. Including people who cared about her and wanted to help her.

  “I’ll take Mrs. Jellicoe’s attic room,” she told Charles. “You and Janey must have this space as soon as you’re wed.”

  “Ah, Cassie.” Charles struggled to his feet, waving off her outstretched hand—then folded her in a cracking hug. “It was the worst luck of your life to be born my twin, and the best luck of mine to be yours.”

  Just for a moment, she settled her head on his shoulder. Then she patted him on the back and extricated herself. “That is one of the best insights you’ve had since you fell out of Lady Deverell’s window and broke your leg. Injury seems to be good for you.”

  Charles rolled his eyes. “Back to the tontine case? I didn’t fall out of her window. I never made it to her window. I told you, the trellis broke.”

  This again. “I asked you not to say that horrid word anymore. And I thought it broke on your way back down from the window. She said you’d been with her.”

  “I’d been with her all right—”
>
  “Spare me.”

  “—but not that night. I’d used the tr—ah, the t-word before. Lady D liked me to use it. She climbed down it sometimes, too. Thought it romantic, I expect.”

  Bells of memory jangled, unmistakable. “Wait. You’re saying you weren’t with Lady Deverell the night you broke your leg. Which was also the night her husband was stabbed.”

  “Right.” Charles lurched to the mantel and seized it for balance.

  “And that the trellis broke as you were climbing up, not down.”

  “I thought we weren’t saying that word anymore?”

  Cass speared him with a Look.

  “Yes,” Charles replied. “I just said all of that.”

  “So you never made it up to the window.”

  “Correct.”

  Memories jarred with this new information, then began to resolve into harmony. If something didn’t make sense, she should know better than to toss it aside. And Lady Deverell’s cringing assertion that all she’d done was kiss the footman on that eventful night had never made sense. Her ladyship should have professed innocence.

  Unless she wasn’t innocent, and a small confession was her shield against a much larger wrongdoing.

  “What are you thinking?” Charles said.

  That maybe she’d already found the pattern. That it had been there, all along, hidden by an earl’s much younger wife’s secrets and kisses, and by an unfortunate accident that might have been nothing of the sort.

  Cass seized Charles’s cheeks in her hand and planted a smacking kiss on the end of his nose. “I’m thinking,” she said, “that you might just have solved the tontine case. And that I need to see that trellis before another day is gone.”

  As she passed the mantel before careening from the room, Grandmama smiled at her.

  Chapter Seventeen

  In the morning, George awoke in his own bed with a powerful headache, a pain in his shoulder, and the teasing feeling that there was something he didn’t want to think about.

  The emerald ring on the table by his bed was eager to remind him.

  First, that this was the day the Duke of Ardmore—at his duke-iest—had decided must mark the end of the tontine case. Second, that Cass had left the day before.

  Third, that he’d all but flung his heart at her trying to make her stay, and she hadn’t done so. She’d left anyway.

  He was used to his plans going as he wished them to, but he never had made a plan for Cassandra Benton. He’d made a plan for the case, but Cass? She’d just . . . happened. She had happened to him like rain happens: you cannot predict it, and you cannot do without it, and it seems it will always be there. Until it’s not, and everything goes dry and bright and one’s head pounds horribly.

  Right, that was the laudanum from yesterday. It was a stubborn bastard. Once it got into your system, it didn’t leave lightly.

  Of course, the same description also applied to Cass.

  He drank off a glass of water, rang for coffee, and with the help of a manservant, struggled into some semblance of dress. The bandages on his injured shoulder made it impossible for him to squeeze into a coat, but while at home, he could get by with shirtsleeves, a waistcoat, and that wonderful sling that made the broken bones of his shoulder sit still and stop aching.

  After draining a cup of bitter, strong coffee and slipping the emerald ring into his pocket, he made his way up to his experiment room. Wasn’t that what he’d used to do when he was completely at leisure, before his suspicions about his father’s accident-prone peers turned into a case? What had he done with his time? Already, it was difficult to remember the Northbrook who had flippantly called Cass plain and hadn’t known her at all. That man had deserved to be shot in the shoulder.

  Here on the giant worktable she’d sat, and he’d stripped off her shoes and very little else—and still brought her to pleasure. There was no sign now that she’d been here at all, save for a paper he’d slipped into the camera obscura before they left the room. Once again, he’d pointed the lens out the window, at the opposing structures of Cavendish Square.

  Drawing the draperies, he lit the amber-shaded lamps, then lifted the lid of the camera obscura and drew out the paper he’d treated. What image would show itself?

  Nothing. It was a blank. A waste of paper and silver salts.

  All the expensive oil paintings that hung around Ardmore House sneered, taunting him that he would never be able to fasten an image as long-dead artists had been doing for centuries. They painted joy and lust and wrath and sloth and every sin and leaping feeling, and he couldn’t even get the image of a damned window to imprint on paper.

  His fingers contracted into a fist, crumpling the paper; then he tossed it aside.

  A whole room for playing about with paper and chemicals, and he’d little to show for it. Really, nothing. Cass had been right; it was a sign of wealth and privilege to have such spaces for doing nothing.

  George wished he could make her need him. She needed work, of course; money, yes. But she could have worked for anyone. Applied her gifts to any case. Worn a ring for any role. Danced and planned with any man.

  Taken anyone to bed, if he caught her fancy. George could have been anyone, anyone at all.

  He wanted to kick something. To curse, to lash out.

  To be better. Irresistible, so that a woman with red hair and a clever mind would not be able to do without him.

  But it was too quiet for kicking things, and he’d no desire to injure his toes as well as his shoulder. He tried out a curse, but it just reminded him of the fishwives of Billingsgate.

  Cass had made it look easy, leaving him. And he was fooling himself to hope that this was one of those difficult things that hurt her heart.

  He turned the larger camera obscura sideways, so it would look upon the table where Cass had sat. He wished she’d left behind some sign that she’d been here, but there was nothing. As if she had never stayed in the house at all. As if Mrs. Benedetti had never existed, even in imagination.

  Still he aimed the camera obscura. Within it, all would be turned and flipped about. Cass Benton tended to have that effect on a person.

  And was that enough, to be able to look at things differently? Did it matter if George could never get anything to stay?

  Wasn’t it better than if it had never existed at all?

  The answer shouldn’t be yes; that went against all sense. But he thought that it was, all the same.

  Shutting his eyes, he pulled in a breath as deeply as he could. It was a breath of old metal and worn wood, of the faint scent of oranges and dusty draperies. It was his space, his room, and his ribs were tight and his lungs were full and his heart was heavy.

  He let the breath go, then took another. Again, then again. Each breath was the same, yet a bit different. The same room, the same air, but something changed within.

  He opened his eyes. Picked up the used sheet of paper, smoothing the side he’d crumpled. Crossing to his shelves, he retrieved another sheet of paper, then considered the little bottles of chemicals. In the resinous light of the lamps, the glass vials held their secrets close. He could hardly tell one from the other. His eyes were blurred.

  He had tried every combination he could think of—but only of a few things. Sunlight. Paper. Silver salts. Iron oxides.

  Cass was adamant that patterns revealed the truth, if one could only spot them. And the truth was, he was in a pattern of endless tinkering. Changing small things, not accomplishing anything real. Maybe not even expecting to.

  To hell with all that.

  Maybe he should work with plates of something else. Glass? No, it would break. Tin, maybe? Something that would neither break nor rust nor tarnish. Something that would stay forever, fixed.

  He would order plates of tin and zinc. They would cost the earth, but he’d no use for scrabbling at the problem. Trying things he thought would probably not work, but that had the virtue of being easy or convenient.

  To hell with all
of that. To hell with fragile glass, with rusting iron or tarnishing bronze or green-patinaed copper or dull dark brass. To the devil with silver; it wanted to turn black no matter what he tried. He’d stick the image on there with glue, with gum paste, with bitumen. He’d leave the camera obscura alone for hours of sunlight, getting every ray, and force the image into the plate.

  He would make a new pattern, and it would be the pattern he wanted to see. And he would persist until it was complete.

  * * *

  When he’d finished in the experiment room, he remembered that he still had the emerald ring in his pocket. As he was already on his way downstairs, he veered aside to the duchess’s rooms and rapped at the door.

  Gatiss didn’t answer at once, which surprised him. The lady’s maid almost never left the duchess unattended. But even lady’s maids had bodily needs, he supposed; she was likely in the washroom or the kitchens.

  He didn’t care to return, so he eased open the bedchamber door and stepped gingerly across the room. There was a writing desk, neat and never used; he’d leave the ring there.

  “George,” came the dusty voice from the bed. “You have hurt your arm.”

  The duchess was awake, as awake as she ever got. Awake enough to notice the sling he wore.

  George ceased his silent creeping and faced the canopied bed. “Good morning, Mother. Someone else hurt my arm. My shoulder, really.”

  This seemed an inadequate explanation. He wasn’t in the habit of coming in every morning simply to wish her good morning—though now that he thought of it, he probably should be.

  The draperies were drawn back, and summery sunlight made the grand room appear warm and cheerful. Her Grace looked rather nice today, clothed in a morning gown and with her hair dressed neatly. If she had been standing, and her eyes had remained open for more than a few seconds at a time, she would have looked almost like her old self.

  “I’m returning your ring,” he explained. “The emerald one you lent me. Is Gatiss in the dressing room? I can hand it back to her at once.”