Julie Anne Long - [Pennyroyal Green 08] Read online

  Hell. With those three words he’d just betrayed he knew exactly who he meant.

  He scarcely knew her, and still here she was, introduced as a topic of conversation by his father, of all people, and was clearly about to be used to illustrate his alleged failings of character. He knew she was trouble.

  “I’m afraid ‘frequenting’ is a bit of an exaggeration, Father. I attended a salon frequented by the sons of many of your friends, as well as a number of authors and poets and artists and the like, and yes, a particular woman acts as hostess on behalf of Countess Mirabeau. The young woman in question is not a member of the aristocracy, and she doesn’t live in the home, from what I understand. But if she’s a courtesan I’m entirely unaware of it. I know very little about her at all.”

  His father winced when Jonathan got to the words “poets” and “artists,” which he seemed to find more troubling than “courtesan.” Jonathan felt rather the same way about poets and artists, truthfully. He was interested in tangible things, not abstract things. He preferred action, building an idea into fruition, rather than sucking the marrow from it, which is what this sort tended to do.

  “What kind of young woman typically plays hostess to a gathering primarily comprised of men, Jonathan?”

  “I’m uncertain, sir. Why don’t you enlighten me?”

  Silence.

  Soooo . . . his father wasn’t going to laugh at all today. That much was clear.

  “Her mother was a Spanish princess, who fled to England after the war.” That was the myth anyway.

  “Of course. Their mothers are always Spanish princesses.”

  “And she’s invited at the behest of the Countess Mirabeau, who is the true hostess of the salon.”

  “The Countess Mirabeau is one hundred and five years old, if she’s a day. I think she may have behaved respectably for approximately three of those years, and she’s been daft for fifty of them.”

  She was daft, but it was in a way that Jonathan rather enjoyed. The countess tended to forget the current decade, and one never knew whether she would appear in a toga, or medieval tunic, or a wig and bustle and patches, or in the first stare of fashion.

  “She is seventy-seven, I’m given to understand. The weekly gathering was entirely her idea, and everyone present is there at her behest.”

  His father raised a dismissive hand. “Irrespective of the salon, there’s the matter of Lady Winslow.”

  Jonathan went still. Truly and nastily surprised.

  And the surprise heated into simmering anger.

  He was a grown man. His dalliances were discreet ones; he wasn’t reckless, nor had he brought shame upon his family. And Lady Philippa Winslow, a widow, was entirely free to do as she pleased, and what he did with Philippa was entirely his business.

  And how would his father have heard about her? He must have eyes bloody everywhere.

  “Were you a virgin when you married, Father? I doubt it, somehow.”

  Or at least that was what he longed to say. What he said instead was, “I’m afraid I’m uncertain what any of this has to do with my proposal to join the Mercury Club, sir.”

  “You’ve no experience with investing, Jonathan. Unless one counts stamina in the gaming hells, or the purchase of gifts for a certain kind of woman, or an investment in time in Five-Card Loo or dart tournaments. The men of the club would be polite to you and all that was gracious, but they would resent the presence of someone who not only hasn’t the personal income or the depth of knowledge to truly contribute to the growth of wealth, but has demonstrated certain, shall we say, caprices of character. They would come to resent me for indulging your presence there.”

  Caprices of character? Since when had being young, good-looking, wealthy, and male constituted a caprice of character?

  And he excelled at both darts and Five-Card Loo.

  Instead, he tried, “I believe I’ve an aptitude for investing. After all, I am your son.”

  Flattery: a time-honored softener of the flinty-hearted. Delivered with a soupçon of charm.

  Little did his father know he did, in fact, have an aptitude.

  Quite an aptitude.

  Not only an aptitude, but a hunger for it, a deep pleasure in it, a sense of it as an art. It was the same sort of hunger that must have driven his father, and his father’s father, to amass the fortune Isaiah Redmond used to control his family—and a good portion of England, in many ways—today. A hunger that none of his other sons had heretofore shown. And it surprised even Jonathan.

  “And in what way have you demonstrated this aptitude?” His father said this almost indulgently. Which made Jonathan want to scream, “I’m not twelve years old.”

  Which of course would make him sound twelve years old. The irony wasn’t lost on him.

  He dug the nails of his fingers into his palm for restraint. “I invested in a cargo of silks and doubled my investment.”

  “Ah. And what remains of your profit?”

  Jonathan hesitated. “At the moment . . .”

  In truth, the answer was “nothing.” But not for the reasons his father assumed.

  His father knew the answer without being told. And it was when Jonathan saw the cynical satisfaction on his father’s face, he decided he’d be damned if he was going to beg. Or even explain further.

  “If you’re short of funds, Jonathan, and this is the reason you wish to participate in the Mercury Club, you can have your portion and more the moment you marry appropriately. Not until then. Then again, I suppose you could always rely on the turn of a card for your future.”

  The word “marry” landed on his ears like the very first note of a funeral march. Now he was good and wary.

  It occurred to him that his father might actually be leading to something unexpected.

  “What does ‘appropriately’ mean?”

  His father sighed. “Why am I not surprised that you should ask such a question?”

  “Forgive me. Perhaps I should have asked: what does ‘appropriately’ mean to you, Father?”

  Jonathan kept his voice level, his face as impassive as he was able.

  But the question was barbed.

  And his father was no fool. He could sniff out a rebellion the way a fox can sniff out a rodent in a thicket. He fixed Jonathan with a cold stare.

  Jonathan was both too angry and too curious now to be cowed.

  Because the question was valid. His older brother Miles had married the wildly inappropriate (as far as Isaiah Redmond was concerned) Cynthia Brightly, and showed no signs of being anything other than gloriously happy, in that very sure, very immovable way Miles had that made it seem like he’d done the most right thing in the world. And then Violet had married an earl of all things, quite unexpectedly, which would have made most parents ecstatic, except that the earl she’d married was Captain Asher Flint, the Earl of Ardmay—purportedly part Indian, nicknamed “The Savage,” of unknown parentage, American-raised no less, who’d earned an earldom from the king in part through application of a set of unsavory skills, violence among them.

  When his father had craved a title his entire life.

  It was funny, when one thought about it. When he was a small child, Jonathan coveted his father’s black stallion more than anything in the world, and he used to try very hard at night to dream of riding it; instead, he wound up dreaming of riding mules, or sawhorses, or tree branches, if he dreamed of riding anything at all.

  For his father, getting his children married to appropriate people must be rather like that. So close, and yet so far.

  Still, no one could argue that the Earl of Ardmay wasn’t the only man alive who could tame Violet and get her happily, if queasily and tyrannically, with child.

  “Appropriately means a woman of whom I approve, born of a fine family, preferably with a title. Surely you could have surmised this much without asking.”

  He paused weightily.

  It was, Jonathan realized even as it was happening, tantamount to the moment be
fore the judge reads a verdict in court.

  “I have in fact decided any additional funds you receive from me will be contingent upon you marrying appropriately inside the year.”

  Jonathan went very still. As though some disgusting and multilegged and poisonous creature, something his naturalist brother Miles might have discovered or known the name of, had settled on him, and would bite if he moved.

  How is it I never saw this coming?

  Then again, his father had a few more decades experience with darts, the metaphorical kind at least, than he did.

  Men who are fatally struck usually take a moment to drop. He felt rather suspended in that moment.

  “If club membership is what you want, and if you believe you have an ‘aptitude,’ as you say, for investment, I think the gentlemen of the Mercury Club would be more inclined to trust the judgment of a married man, Jonathan. After all, marriage demonstrates one’s willingness to shoulder responsibility and manage a household, and requires a certain steadiness of character.”

  This was such balderdash that Jonathan had to bite down on his back teeth to keep his jaw from swinging wide. Drinking and gambling had practically been invented in order to help married men forget about their wives. Everyone knew that.

  My father really does believe I’m stupid, he thought, in some surprise. Or at best, he thinks I’m a feckless child.

  And for a moment he sat feeling strangely hollow, as if someone had just taken a spoon and scooped him out like a melon.

  How little he knows of happiness, despite Miles. Despite Violet. Despite Lyon. He still thinks he can manufacture happiness. His own, that was. From the lives of his children. As far as Isaiah was concerned, there really was very little difference between control and happiness.

  “The end of the year is . . . six months away.”

  “Excellent arithmetic, son,” Isaiah said dryly. “Surely you can manage to reach an agreement with a young woman of good family and fortune. You’ve a certain amount to recommend you—your family name and money, breeding, your good looks. Dozens of lovely girls come eligible every day. We can cement an alliance with an excellent family. There’s Lady Grace Worthington, for instance. And surely marrying a beautiful girl will be no hardship.”

  A certain amount?

  I’ve a “certain amount” to recommend me?

  And really, if this was happening to someone else, it might be terribly funny. But as Jonathan heard his alleged assets inventoried by his father, he felt himself nearly lift out of his body, and he observed the proceedings as if he floated overhead. He was a name and a face, was he? He was a youngest son, and a place would need to be found for him, as if he was a . . . superfluous vase. And this was all he had to offer the world?

  Ah, but damn Lyon and Miles, both of whom had escaped Isaiah Redmond’s iron grasp. Not without cost, of course. Lyon, the golden child, the heir, handsome, popular, charismatic, brilliant, the basket into which his father had put all of his proverbial eggs, had vanished entirely. Miles was still struggling to find enough funders for his next expedition, for his father had refused to assist him in light of his inappropriate marriage. And of course, he was still not precisely warmly received by his father, given that he’d married Cynthia Brightly, who was not received in their home.

  He’d been unable to punish them, or not as thoroughly as he would have liked, so Isaiah clearly intended to leave nothing to chance where it came to Jonathan.

  And this, he realized, was what this conversation was truly about.

  “I feel obliged to point out that I haven’t yet disappeared, Father. Surely that fact numbers among my virtues, too.”

  Isaiah lifted his head. He pinned him with a quelling stare.

  Clearly he wasn’t at all amused. The “yet” in particular did Jonathan no favors.

  But, God, it had been tremendously satisfying to say it. Because if his father possessed any vulnerability at all, it had to do with Lyon. His Achilles’ heel.

  Jonathan met his father’s gaze evenly.

  Blink, you bastard, he willed him.

  “I feel certain you’ll do your duty, Jonathan.”

  He said it almost gently. But under the circumstances Jonathan thought he’d possibly never heard more contemptuous words.

  He really thinks I will do precisely what he says, he thought.

  Good God. He doesn’t know me at all.

  How crushing.

  How illuminating.

  How . . . potentially very useful.

  “Brandy, son?’

  And Jonathan thought with dark amusement that his father had anticipated he’d need a drink at this point in the conversation. Always the strategist, Isaiah Redmond.

  “No, thank you, Father. I best be off to compile a list of potential brides. Six months passes quickly, you know.”

  He departed with an exaggerated wink. Winks—just the sort of thing his father loathed.

  Chapter 4

  TOMMY WAS IN JUST a little over her head.

  This realization solidified the moment she found another message slipped under her door. To anyone else the message might have looked like a bit of detritus carried in from the street on someone’s shoe. She knew better.

  She hesitated. Then she plucked it up gingerly between her fingers, and carried it to her table. Nonchalantly she lit a lamp, allowed it to flare into life and set her room aglow, and then settled down at the table, her chin cradled in her hands, and stared down at it.

  Postponing the moment when she would need to make a decision.

  She didn’t usually mind being just a bit in over her head. She generally flailed like a becalmed ship, irritable and purposeless and panicked, when things were simple. And if no challenge could be found, she had the dubious gift of creating one. She’d never known any other way, really. Resistance was the headwind into which she sailed.

  Thud! Thud! Thud!

  She gave a yelp. The entire building, made of kindling as it was, rocked, shuddered, and creaked. She lunged to keep her lamp from hopping off the table.

  The thudding stopped.

  She smiled. “Greetings, Rutherford!” she shouted at the ceiling.

  “Greetings, Miss Tommy!” he boomed.

  Rutherford lived in a suite of rooms above hers, and he was huge. When he moved about, the whole building trembled and squeaked and groaned as if it were a ship on the breast of a stormy sea. But he wasn’t generally home. Sometimes he found work on the docks or on a ship or as a builder, and often he was away for weeks at a time, engaged in something far more interesting and dubious.

  As he had been, for instance, when he’d last worked for her.

  Dubious occupations, in fact, seemed to be one unifying characteristic of the people who lived in her building. It was where her mother had ultimately died, young, ill, and penniless, and it was where Tommy, when she’d found her way back to it, had cobbled together a motley family of sorts, for they had loved her mother. Her rooms were small and as snug as a shoe, filled with the few fine things her mother had left behind when she died, and she was surrounded by the sounds of life, which in this building were primarily thumping: Rutherford walking from one end of the room to another, Maggie’s bed slamming against the wall as she entertained gentlemen callers, the four Beatty children thundering up and down the stairs. Things of that sort.

  All in all she had little time to feel lonely. And yet when it was dark, and she’d doused her lamp and the thumping had ceased for the night, she sometimes felt she was on a raft alone at sea, and would awake in a panic, gripping the sides of her bed. Loneliness had a sound, and it was the absence of thumping.

  Still avoiding the message, she laid out the medal gently on the table and touched her fingers to it for courage. Last night at the Duke of Greyfolk’s wasn’t really a failure of nerve yet, not really. It had been just a start, she told herself—because honestly, imagine her nerve failing! The sky would sooner fall. Jonathan Redmond had interrupted her, that was all.

 
She took a deep breath and leaned over the scrap of paper, hands clasped against her forehead.

  It appeared to have been torn from an old book by someone who couldn’t easily obtain foolscap or ink. In the narrow margin, in tiny painstaking letters, scratched with a burnt stick most likely, were the words:

  She’ll be waiting at the place we discussed, at the day we discussed, one of the clock.

  She recognized the careful even script of Lord Feckwith’s cook. She hadn’t, of course, signed it. Signing it could mean her death. Not to mention Tommy’s.

  She closed her eyes and drew in a long breath. Released it, fluttering her lamp flame.

  Would she do it again?

  Could she do it again?

  Because the last time had . . . well, it hadn’t gone precisely as she’d hoped.

  She absently rubbed at her arm. It didn’t hurt anymore, and there would be a little scar soon—The Doctor, who was never known by anything other than The Doctor, and therefore was clearly as dubious as everyone else—did competent work. Still, it was one more mark her body bore.

  It would be the only scar of which she’d ever be proud, however.

  The irony was they’d likely been aiming for Rutherford, who was an infinitely larger and more conspicuous target. And what kind of shooting was that, if they’d missed him? Pretty sorry shooting, if you asked her.

  Now Jonathan Redmond . . . in all likelihood, given what she knew about him, he wouldn’t miss his target.

  A little half smile found its way onto her face. The cheek of the man. She liked cheek. She liked a man who spoke to her as if she was a person, an equal, as if she were in on the joke. There was a freedom in not wanting anything from each other, which so seldom happened between men and women.

  There was much to be wary of about him, too. For instance, those vast shoulders, and those cheekbones that called to mind battlements, so chiseled were they, all of which contrived to whip female heads around like compass needles. But she suspected it was something else . . . she would have called it a fine veneer of cynicism, a sort of detachment, as if he’d seen things that others had not, knew things that others did not . . . that lured females into dashing themselves on the allegedly rocky shoals of his heart.