Chapter 18
Ruby supposed it could have been awkward.
She knew awkward—knew sidelong glances and hot embarrassment rising to her skin—and the morning after ought to have been ripe for such a feeling, as she crept down the tower stairs with her chemise sticking to her legs and blue paint all over Archer’s irremediably pigment-streaked shirt.
It ought to have been awkward. But she could not stop laughing to feel it.
He wanted her. It was perhaps a sign of her weakness that the very notion of her own desirability could bring her such pleasure, but—well. She was weak, then. She liked this sweet-tongued, true-hearted, wicked piratical man so terribly much, and she wanted him to fancy her too.
As they crept down the stairs, she felt almost lightheaded with happiness. The princess was coming, and the house was nearly ready. Ruby had painted and patched and carted furniture and put earth in pots and somehow, the peculiar old house was almost beautiful now.
Somehow, it seemed to her that they had made it that way—she and Archer together.
For however long it lasted—however long she might be able to remain here at Pomeroy House—they were on the same side.
At her own corridor, she hesitated. They had stayed all night in the tower room, tangled together on the chaise.
The sun was just now rising, and Tamsin and Alice were sure to be asleep in their chambers, here in this very hall.
“Do you suppose I should try to hide?” She glanced down at herself—whisker-scraped along her breasts, glistening with oil in spots, and heaven only knew the state of her hair—and then back up at him. “I’m afraid I look . . .”
“Guilty as sin?” He was laughing too, his dimples softening the impossible angle of his jaw.
“Edible? Do you know, the first time I saw you sparkling all over, I thought you looked like a comfit. Come on, stand behind me. We’ll creep down the corridor and if someone peeks her head out of her room, it’ll look as though I’m walking by myself. ”
“Oh, to be sure. Whilst your petticoats flap around your ankles. No one will suspect a thing.”
He winked lasciviously at her. “I suppose you’d best remove your petticoats, pet. For the purposes of disguise.”
“Is this your offer of assistance?”
He nudged her back against the wall, fitting his body to hers. “Anytime,” he said fervently. “Day or night.”
His mouth was at her neck. Her voice came out breathless. “Your purposes are so often nefarious.”
“Mm. My motives always ulterior.”
The string of tiny nips and bites he had delivered to her throat seemed to have touched off sparks inside her body, and her attempt at further repartee emerged, unfortunately, as a melting sort of whimper.
“God,” he mumbled, “I could—”
Any further interesting revelations of what he could do—hopefully to her person—were interrupted by the resounding slam of a door.
And then the distinctive and furious barking of an Italian greyhound.
And then a scream.
He lifted his head, cast her a single, startled glance, and then dropped her ribbons and sprinted toward the stairs. “Stay put,” he ordered.
Honestly, she could not fathom why he thought his barked commands would work upon her. She picked up her skirts and chased after him.
They made it all the way to the front door of Pomeroy House before they ascertained the cause of the commotion.
Lamentation, Gerry, Wall, Eugénie, Tamsin, Alice, Signor Neri, and four or five dogs were crowded in clumps in the parlor, which resounded with barking and shouting in at least two recognizable languages.
Vanessa cowered in the corner, as far as possible from Zenobia, who was growling furiously from her position in the arms of a small, sodden, exceptionally bedraggled woman.
The woman’s black hair hung in wet, sandy clumps all the way down to her waist. Her lips were white and her teeth appeared to be bared and lightly chattering.
She looked irate. And freezing.
“What the devil’s going on?” Archer demanded as he skidded into the room. “What was that screaming?”
“I am so sorry,” Alice said, sounding choked. “That was me. Vanessa got free when Zenobia raced by and—”
The tiny, angry woman drew herself up.
And with a dawning sense of horror, Ruby recognized her.
“What is this?” the woman demanded. “Why is Zenobia loose among these other canines?” She clutched the snarling greyhound closer. “What have you people done to her?”
“What have we done?” exclaimed Lamentation. “What has she done to us, you might as well ask. I’ve lost two fingertips and a boot trying to feed her cuts of lamb. I’ve—”
“I beg your pardon,” the woman said frostily. “Who are you, to speak of Zenobia so?”
“Oh, I’m nobody. I’m just the footman to a bloody Italian royal dog! Who are y—” Lamentation’s speech cut off abruptly, like a bird colliding with a pane of glass.
Revelation, it appeared, had reached him too.
The woman stood ramrod straight. She looked very much the way she did in all the newspaper engravings, except covered head-to-toe in water and sand. “I am Serafina Fiammetta Paxe Maria,” she said, “of House di Sangro. Princess of Monfalcone.”
“Oh,” Lamentation said weakly. He swallowed. “Welcome home.”
It was at this point that the clamor they had interrupted broke out again. Neri leapt forward, his handkerchief raised as if to brush the sand from the princess’s royal personage. Zenobia growled, and Vanessa, with a tail-down whimper, fled the scene, Alice and the bloodhounds hot on her heels.
And Princess Serafina surveyed them all, pale and bedraggled and icily furious. “Who,” she demanded, “are all of you people in my house?”
* * *
Once, when Ruby was twenty and Cassandra eighteen, the Earl of Hangleton had entertained the prime minister for dinner.
He did not usually have guests at home, not since his wife had died.
Ruby had been painfully thrilled and anxious at the notion that she might play the role of hostess, and even her father’s stern warning—Don’t embarrass me, Ruby, not tonight—had not cooled her enthusiasm.
At dinner, Cassandra had been the picture of calm, decorous politesse, and Ruby had been too—grimly determined to do everything, everything right.
And then, as she’d watched, the candelabrum behind Liverpool’s head had somehow lit the drapes on fire.
Liverpool, a stern fair-haired Tory in his middle forties, had not seen the flames. No one had except Ruby, who’d looked desperately from her sister to her father to the liveried footmen and watched a very slowly moving catastrophe happen right in front of her eyes.
That was how she felt as she watched the Princess Serafina take over Pomeroy House.
The princess had waved off Neri’s handkerchief. She had fixed her gaze upon Tamsin’s freckled face instead, flung out a commanding hand, and said: “You will find for me a bath. And a dressing gown.”
Tamsin—daughter of the 6th Viscount Drake and niece to the Countess of Bridestowe—had gone rather pink and smothered at that. But she had done what she was told.
Only once she was bathed and wrapped in Ruby’s own robe did the princess consent to explain why she was here at Pomeroy House several days early, alone and half drowned.
“Assassination,” she said acidly. “A poor attempt at one.”
She sat erect on the high bed in the chamber that Ruby had painstakingly outfitted for her these last weeks, her knees tucked beneath her. The fresh flush on her olive skin and her damp hair made a startling contrast with the aristocratic authority on her face and the perfect set of her shoulders.
The words hung in the air. Even the dogs had gone hushed, sensitive to the sudden crackle of tension in the room.
Ruby stared.
Had the woman said . . . “assassination”?
It appeared she had. Neri had found himself a place on the ground near the princess’s feet, and at her words, he found his handkerchief again. This time he dabbed at his own brow. “Ah, sua maestá,” he whispered. “Not Verdura? Not again?”
“Sí,” she said coolly. “Verdura.”
And then she explained.
She had been, it seemed, visiting a cousin in Sardinia and had set out from there by ship to meet Signor Neri at the holiday house in Cornwall. She had been three-quarters of the way through the ship journey when her schooner had been set upon by what she had at first taken to be pirates.
The first mate—her own man, a servant of House di Sangro—had hustled her into a dinghy and begun the slow process of rowing them to shore. But to her astonishment, three of the pirates had left the schooner and given chase.
“I was the target,” she said. The words were flat. If Ruby had not seen the way her hands trembled on Zenobia’s diamond-studded collar, she might have thought the princess emotionless. “The men were not after the ship. They were after me. They meant to see me dead.”
She had plunged from the dinghy into the water, and the mate had charged the pursuing pirates, brandishing his pistols. He had led them away from her—had let her slip away unscathed.
“House di Sangro will not forget,” she said. Her voice sounded like acid-etched glass, but her hands on Zenobia’s collar shook harder. “His family will be rewarded for the service he rendered me.”
“Maestá,” Neri said. He looked sick. “How did you make it to shore?”
She lifted her chin, and if Ruby had not known she was royalty, the self-possessed gesture alone would have revealed it. “I swam,” she said. “All night. And when I was close enough to the cliffs, I recognized the silhouette of my own house.”
Ruby’s heart lurched. She could imagine it all—the violence, the angry noise of steel and gunpowder, the cold seawater and heavy weight of a sodden gown.
The princess’s feet had been bare, and the walk up the cliffs was steep and cragged.
She could imagine the princess’s terror, the stark relief at the sight of Pomeroy House, turreted and looming at the top of the cliffs.