Chapter Eleven
On the way back to her rooms, Celine stopped a footman who was hurrying along the hallway holding a wooden box. “Excuse me. Who is the woman, she waits downstairs?”
That is the worst person in London. You will stay away from her.
The footman knew immediately who she meant. He scowled and shifted the box to his hip. “Oh, her? That’s Her Grace’s cousin.”
“Her cousin?” she said, appalled. It was obvious the woman had been waiting a long time, and that she’d been given neither refreshments nor company.
She had known the duke treated other people like dirt, without mercy or consideration, but it somehow still shocked her to find the duke wouldn’t see her own cousin, to whom every law of human decency bound her.
Celine thought with longing of the Pecke household, where affectionate warmth was a matter of course.
“Aye, Her Lordship the Marquess of Royston. A real scoundrel, though it ain’t my place to say so. Don’t you give her another thought, miss, she’ll leave eventually.” Something seemed to occur to him, and he added, “Maybe lock your door tonight, though. Just in case.”
“Thank you,” she said, still reeling a little from the revelation.
She waited until the footman had disappeared around the corner, then made her way down to the green salon and peered in.
Lord Royston was still there, sprawled in a chair by the fire.
The glow reflected off her tall black boots and the gold stitching in her scarlet waistcoat.
Her cravat hung loose around the open neck of her shirt where a familiar pendant hung on a necklace.
A greatcoat with at least five capes was thrown over her shoulders.
It gave her tall, athletic form the nonchalant elegance of a brooding prince.
She stared into the flames with an expression of unutterable boredom.
Where the duke was light, Lord Royston was dark. Her face was thinner and less brutal, her mouth and eyes heavy from habitual overindulgence. Her long hair was pulled over one shoulder within the mantle of her coat.
Now that Celine was looking for it, the family resemblance was clear in the severe brow and cheeks, and the nose with its fine, chiselled tip. But the sharp features had a different effect in Lord Royston’s thin face. She looked dissolute. Sardonic.
Defeated.
Celine buttoned her dressing gown, then entered and announced herself with a delicate cough.
In the first instant, Lord Royston’s expression was inscrutable. Had she hoped it was the duke who had come? Feared it? It was impossible to tell.
Then she tipped her head back against the seat, exposing the long column of her throat, and looked at Celine from beneath heavy lids. She smiled, slow and wicked. Sprawled in the chair, her clothes half undone, her beauty wrecked by dissipation, she looked like Lucifer incarnate.
“Oh goody,” she purred, “a pretty little morsel for my supper.”
Celine pursed her lips, amused. “Does your supper scream or swoon, usually? I want to get it right.”
The lids dropped a fraction, and the mouth twitched. “I’ll make you do both, if you like. Scream first, swoon second, for preference. What a delightful accent.”
She blushed. What did she sound like to this English marquess? “I scream in twenty-five languages. Take your pick.”
“Oh, my sweet child,” Lord Royston said in a voice as dark as sin. “With me, you’ll only need one word, and it’s the same in every language.”
My name.
That was what the marquess was going to say, a prompt for her to ask for the marquess’s name, putting them on more intimate terms. This style of flirtation was Celine’s native tongue.
“Mediocre?” she suggested.
Lord Royston blinked, sat up straight, then threw her head back and laughed. Her shoulders and chest shook as the heady sound filled the room. When she settled back into her seat, she rubbed a palm over her face, looking up at Celine over it, evaluating her in a new way.
“Who are you?” Lord Royston said at last.
“The duke tells me to stay away from you.”
Lord Royston’s mouth twitched with new mirth. “Don’t tell me my cousin’s conceded she is human and got herself a mistress? No, that’s not it. She leaves pleasure to those of us who are prepared to inflict any damage seeking it out.”
There was something about the words that made Celine wonder if the duke had said them to Lord Royston once upon a time, and they’d never been forgotten.
“I’m her ward,” Celine admitted. Lord Royston and the duke were clearly not on such terms that she could risk the truth. “She knew my father of many years, and promised to see to my future when he died.”
“A ward!” Lord Royston exclaimed. “A ward. Christ. And good luck to you, if your future is in her hands. Mine was once upon a time as well, and as you see, she won’t even walk down the hall to speak with me now.”
Celine felt a sudden, powerful kinship to the duke’s cousin. There wasn’t a doubt in her mind that whatever had gone wrong between the duke and Lord Royston, it was the duke’s fault. It was what the duke did. She wrecked people.
The humour seemed to drain out of Lord Royston all at once and she looked tired, her nights of revelry weighing on her.
She looked up into the ceiling, and her expression turned bleak.
“I don’t know how she lives here. Just spending a single day makes me feel like I’m dying.
If I had to live here, day in day out, I would go stark raving mad.
More proof she has no heart to speak of. ”
“No heart whatsoever,” Celine agreed, with feeling. “Did something happen here?” Lord Royston made it sound like this house was a mausoleum, or the site of a massacre.
She thought about her elegant dressing room with its single imperfection: One of the wall tapestries was singed away at the corner. She thought about how new the house was in its ancient yard. She shivered with a dark premonition.
Lord Royston laughed, her eyes looking into some painful past Celine couldn’t see.
“In this house? No. This house is perfect. Unblemished. Not a trace of the horror it was built upon. No, it was the other house. The house that was here before. The house we grew up in together under the total power of that woman. It’s the ghost of that house that scares me to death. ”
Celine shivered again and Lord Royston looked up, seeming to come back to herself.
“I’m scaring you,” she said quietly. “Forgive me. It was all a long time ago now, and you had nothing to do with it.”
She wanted to push for more. What exactly had happened here? She felt sure it had something to do with the letter she held over the duke, and the reason it was so very effective.
But Lord Royston was right: These long-ago events had nothing to do with her. As long as the letter was effective, it didn’t matter why.
“Why come here, then, if you hate it?”
“Money,” Lord Royston said baldly. “I’m desperate.”
She thought—of course she did—of the duke’s offer to buy her a husband. Was Lord Royston desperate enough? It was almost irresistible, the notion of getting Lord Royston the duke’s money by such means.
But she wouldn’t put her hard-won future in the hands of a drunk and a scoundrel. No. It wouldn’t do at all.
Perhaps she could still help, though. Lord Royston didn’t have access to blackmail like she did, but there must be better ways to get the duke’s attention. “I think,” she said delicately, “I can help. But you must do just as I say.”
“You can help?” Something complicated happened to Lord Royston’s face, but all too quickly it settled back into its cynical cast. “Forgive my scepticism, but you are foreign, young, and entirely beholden to my cousin. Though it was kind of you to offer—far kinder than I deserve.”
“The duke takes me to Bond Street tomorrow,” she persisted. “You will come also. It will be a…” What was the word? “A happy coincidence.”
“She will cross the street to avoid me.”
“In public? And with you minding your manners? No.”
“That won’t make any difference to her.”
“But now the duke has a young ward to marry off,” Celine said, clasping her hands and fluttering her lashes. “She has to behave in public, no?”
The marquess stilled, unsure, her eyes tightening with the small signs of pain that made Celine think she was enduring a raging headache.
Then laughter lit her face, as startling and sudden as all her moods seemed to be. “I can’t imagine my cousin escorting you from shop to shop. No, I can’t make the picture at all. Will she hold your packages for you, do you think?”
Celine laughed in return at the unlikely image. “Will she put her coat down over a puddle for me, perhaps?”
The marquess leapt from her chair and began to walk about the room in the most preposterous, unnatural manner.
“Perhaps she will do the Bond Street roll.” She threw Celine a faux-scolding look, obviously pleased with herself for Celine’s peals of laughter.
“Do take me seriously, Miss Genet, I roll without compare.”
Celine wiped moisture from her eye and put her hand out for the marquess’s. “You will come, Lord Royston. You will behave. And you will not ask for even one penny.” She smiled wickedly. “Yet.”