Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
She wasn’t at the Skylar rout. Miss Pevensey was, and her eyes widened when Jem appeared, but she had replaced her distinctive cousin with her mama for chaperone. Lady Pevensey strained to catch Jem’s eye, but he did not oblige.
None of the Gorgons were in attendance, and Jem felt the lack. Lady Clara had called it oddness, but it was some other, ineffable essence that attended those four distinct young ladies. They added interest to a room. Jem would like to outfit them all and have it known they patronized his shop.
She was not at Lady Cranbury’s card party, and neither was she at Lady Hillsborough’s converzatione.
Clara Bellwether was, and she could confirm that neither Lucasta Lithwick nor any of the Gorgons were attending the other three parties she had looked in on that evening.
Clara met Jem’s inquiry with a sly smile, and he cursed himself for being obvious.
By tomorrow, it wouldn’t simply be hinted that his head had been turned; the gossips would have him in full pursuit.
He was furious again—he, who was generally slow to anger.
But why, he couldn’t say. Only that not being able to run her to ground felt like Lucasta Lithwick was changing the rules of engagement.
She was supposed to be at the Skylar rout so he could single her out for his attentions, elevate her as the topic of discussion on every tongue in the beau monde, and then watch what she did with the sudden marks of favor.
How was he supposed to make her fashionable when she was not at any of the society ’dos, waiting breathlessly for his notice?
“Could go back to the club and have a drink,” Plimpton observed, having attached himself to Jem as a welcome excuse to leave Lady Cranbury’s card party, where he had been diving rather deeply into his pockets and into drink.
“Wouldn’t you rather one of the theatres?
” Ashley, who gratefully traded Lady Hillsborough’s guests for Jem and Plimpton’s company, gave Plimpton a jab in the side as they hailed a hack on the sidewalk outside Hillsborough House.
“Seems to me you need a chorus girl to console you after your latest rebuff.”
“New opera at the Haymarket tonight.” Plimpton revived at this recollection. “Some doleful Italian bit, but an opera means opera dancers. Up for some fun, Rudyard?”
“Why not?” Jem shrugged, though he did not make a habit of getting up intrigues with chorus girls or keeping a mistress the way Ashley and other youngbloods did.
For one thing, mistresses were expensive.
But he was also fastidious about his sexual habits, another aspect of being raised a tradesman’s son.
He liked for a woman to be partial to him and not simply on the hunt for a keeper.
Nevertheless he joined his friends inside the hired coach, which smelled strongly of the last tenant’s cologne, and the body odor the cologne had been intended to disguise.
If the night was to be counted a loss in terms of his revenge, Jem would rather pass it watching actors shriek and fuss upon a stage than stand in a drawing room fielding speculation about his interest in Lucasta Lithwick.
His grandfather the marquess held a box at the King’s Theatre, which was to Jem’s advantage, since Plimpton was pockets-to-let again and Ashley had lost his purse on some stupid bet. They strolled late into the cavernous performance hall, with its massive interior space that swallowed sound.
He spotted her at once. There, crowding the stage below one of the enormous Gainsborough paintings, wearing a gown of lurid clashing stripes and a look of complete and utter captivation, stood Miss Lucasta Lithwick, her Gorgon sisters with her.
She was not at any society entertainments, clinging to the wall and waiting for him to walk through the door.
She was not, as Miss Pevensey was doing and Bertie longed to do, thronging the parlors of the nobility waiting for an eligible parti to take an interest. Nor, as he had intended, was she trapped in a ballroom, the subject of stares and gossip.
No, Miss Lithwick had escaped to the opera, in pursuit of nothing but her own pleasure, and the expression on her fluid, expressive features said that she floated in the realm of the sublime.
Logic and calculation fled before a deeper prompting Jem could not but obey.
Uncaring what his friends might think of either his tactics or his motives, he headed toward the stage, where those who desired intimate exposure to the action paid for the privilege of being close enough to touch the singers, and occasionally distract them.
A miasma of perfumes surrounded him as he crossed the pit, a plethora of competing florals and musks emanating from bodies and fabrics and hair.
It was easy enough to maneuver behind the Gorgons, where he could observe but not be noticed.
Standing closer than was proper to Lucasta Lithwick, Jem detected a different scent, clean, earthy, yet complex.
A scent that struck him as both sweet and dark, prim and naughty at the same time. It suited her.
Despite the objectionable gown, her head was stylish, as if someone else had the care of her from the neck up.
Beneath a cap of gauze and ribbons and feathers, her hair was dressed in a fashionable chignon and powdered the reddish apricot color that was all the rage at the moment.
The powder was so subtle, in fact, that he smelled no powder at all, nor had turmeric fallen onto her shoulders and gown, as it did to so many other poor girls who attempted that same burnished red-gold.
“Your Signor Marchesi seems out of sorts tonight,” remarked one of the Gorgons. The German duke’s daughter who had snubbed Ashley at the Queen’s levee, crushing his pretensions quite thoroughly. “I would have thought he’d enjoy playing a diva like Achilles.”
“I wonder if he has a head-cold, the poor dear,” Miss Lithwick remarked. “That cadenza he added to his last aria was not up to his usual standards.”
“Iphigenia doesn’t care if she lives or dies,” said the other tall one, the Russian princess. Jem wondered fleetingly why the two foreign girls, who could be the toast of London for their exotic looks and their not altogether undashing style, chose not to make the effort to enchant anyone.
“She’s a soubrette, and the part is written for a spinto soprano,” Lucasta answered. “She’s straining to reach above her range, and I don’t think she understands a word of Italian.”
“The chorus sounds disjointed somehow,” the petite one said.
She was an appealing thing, if not to Jem’s taste, and he had endeavored to give her a hint when she had worn a costume one night that flattered neither her color nor her figure.
It appeared she had heeded his advice, to great improvement.
“They’re coming in on all the wrong cues,” Miss Lithwick snapped. “Is the conductor drunk or blind?”
Jem stiffened. For a moment he saw red, and it was not Miss Lithwick’s hair. The sheer arrogance of the remark, the breathless, unthinking cruelty was a mark of the upper class, no different from what he encountered a dozen times a day. It was the world they lived in.
He wanted the world to be better. He wanted her to be better.
He leaned close, his tone low and his nose close to the stray curl hanging behind her ear. “So a man who is castrated might master music, but a man who is blind cannot?”
She stilled, but a strange ripple passed through her, as if she were a plucked string. He felt her attention lift and focus on him before, very slowly, she turned her chin. That direct gaze had a strange effect on his insides.
He had not been mistaken about the shade of her eyes, a greenish brown flecked with gold. The dusky rose of a blush appeared on her cheeks.
“I beg your pardon, Lord Rudyard. I did not see you there.”
Of course not, because he had approached her with the stealth of a poacher stalking a deer.
“Your remarks about the conductor,” he prompted. It was rude to interrogate a young lady, but he wanted her prejudice out in the open. Perhaps it would finally free him of this foolish impulse to hang upon her opinions. “I gather you dislike his technique.”
He watched her sort through her mind for what she had said and, as anyone would do when called to account, tried to modify the harshness of her complaint. “I was suggesting a man too far in his cups might lose track of his cues.”
“I thought you had assumed he was blind, and therefore incompetent.” His voice was soft, silken with fury. Lucasta Lithwick did not know him well enough to recognize this. She stared fixedly at his cravat pin, as if it fascinated her.
“They are not equivalent, and it was wrong of me to suggest it.” Her brows knit in a frown. “Mr. John Stanley composes beautiful music. He is a governor of the Foundling Hospital and Master of the King’s Band, and he has been almost entirely blind since childhood.”
Jem knew Mr. Stanley but was surprised Miss Lithwick did. Still, her repentance was not enough to put him in charity with her.
“I thought castratos were falling out of fashion.” He glanced at the stage where Achilles, in a display of musical histrionics, was lamenting the ruse that had brought Iphigenia to the port where the Greek armies gathered, her fate not marriage to him but death as a promised sacrifice for a fair wind to Troy.
“Achilles seems to enjoy being the center of attention.”
As she was supposed to be doing, rather than hiding here. She transferred her attention to the stage, and he was forgotten.
“Signor Marchesi is a rare talent. That voice! He has the most remarkable gift of timbre and range. If he adds rather too much coloratura, and enjoys his bravura performances far more than his cantabile singing, it is perhaps to be forgiven.”
Jem felt jealousy sharpen its teeth on his temper. Jealousy, over a man who was not a full man! “You seem an ardent admirer. He is very handsome.”