Blackstone's Bride (15 page)

She tried to pay attention to her guests, but she could see Blackstone in the midst of her boys while Penelope and the prince looked on. The boys seemed to consume Blackstone’s entire attention. He led them to the center of the field, to the strip between the stumps, and had them rub their hands in the grass. He shed his jacket and tossed it carelessly aside, so that his white sleeves billowed, and his gray silk waistcoat hugged his lean torso. She watched appalled as he made the boys wipe their hands on their new white flannel trousers. They grinned at each other and exchanged shoves and slaps. Then Blackstone turned them to look at the field. They spread out, looking over the field and gesturing to different parts of it. He shook hands with each of them and made his way back to her with his easy stride. The prince and the duchess and Cahul remained on the field while the prince took practice swings with his bat.

“How did you know that the blue caps were my team?” Violet wondered what the duchess made of Blackstone’s walking away from her.

“New uniforms, right?”

“I wanted them to have all the proper gear. They are not inferior players just because they don’t attend a public school.”

“I’m sure they’re not.”

“Then why did you have them dirty their new whites?”

“Do you want them to win?” He accepted a pot of ale from a waiter.

“Yes.”

“Then thank me, Violet. They weren’t going to play fearlessly if they were afraid of getting a bit of grass on their finery.” He reached up and tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear under her bonnet, the chocolate silk she’d purchased from Madame Girard. And she thought,
Don’t make me love you again
.

“And why did you tell the prince that piece of ancient history about Frederick’s death? Do you want to terrify him?”

“It popped into my head. The past is on my mind, and the prince needs a better sense of caution. He has none.” He downed his ale and strode back to the field.

The count, countess, and Dubusari returned to the spectators’ awning to watch the match with Violet. She should be questioning them, trying to get at the mystery of Frank’s absence, but she could not while Blackstone stood in the field with the duchess.

First Blackstone, and then the prince, gave the duchess lessons in holding a cricket bat. The prince showed Blackstone his bat, and then Blackstone tested the bat with some bowls from one of Violet’s boys. He pointed out something about the bat to the prince, and then a tall boy from the Knightsbridge team offered the prince his bat. Blackstone handed Cahul the rejected bat and took a position behind the wickets to cheer the prince on. After hitting a ball over the boundary without a bounce, his majesty escorted Penelope from the field, flushed with triumph. He mopped his brow and accepted a glass of cold ale at Violet’s side. “Miss Hammersley, I must thank your brother. He taught me well.”

The officials signaled the boys to begin play. By two the sky was leaden with overcast. The Knightsbridge schoolboys had had quite a run, and as Violet’s team took the field, it was clear they would have to play extraordinarily well to match their opponents. Blackstone moved from boy to boy, offering advice or a steadying hand on a shoulder. The Knightsbridge bowler and fielders quickly eliminated the first of the Violet’s team’s batsmen while the spectators retreated more and more under the awning, except the supporters of Violet’s boys. She excused herself from the royal party, and went to urge them all under the flapping tent. Blackstone stayed on the field. Penelope took up a position next to Violet.

“He’s a pleasure to watch, isn’t he?”

“He’s a great example to the boys.”

“You never saw that painting of him, did you?”

Violet shook her head. There was no question of which painting Penelope referred to and no reason for Violet to pretend she had seen it.

“You would be vastly reassured if you had,” Penelope remarked. “It’s obvious from the painting that he’s so wrong for you.”

“You think I should see the painting? Now?”

“It can be arranged, you know.”

“What need is there? I told you I know his true character.” She said it to be contradicted. She wanted someone to say—
Violet, dear, you have it wrong. Blackstone has no harem, no lost fortune. He’s a man of honor and principle.

But Penelope made no contradiction. She continued in a calm voice.

“You should see it for your own peace of mind, Violet. He’s a game player, and you”—she shrugged—“are not. You are one of life’s earnest, sensible people. You’re straightforward and honest. You’re never idle. You don’t strategize and you don’t risk. You tick things off your list. You don’t do frivolous things—like playing a game—just for the pleasure, just to be alive and enjoying doing something.”

“I stand condemned of dull respectability. Apparently, it’s the Rushbrookes of the world for me.” She felt her cheeks flame with humiliation.

Penelope laughed. “My dear, I sincerely hope not. But you will not be happy with Blackstone. It’s natural for him to charm. He’s a man who enjoys women. A woman cannot expect fidelity or even sustained interest from such a man. He’s simply made for pleasure.”

Penelope drifted back to the prince and his party. Violet watched the action on the field. What did she really know of Blackstone? He was right in front of her, but every moment she was reminded that she didn’t know him. Except one thing, the thing that was right in front of her. He was instinctively kind.

She remembered the day she’d borrowed Frank’s robes and gone in male dress to hear Ricardo lecture on economics. She’d sat apart from the young collegians in the lecture hall, but not so far apart that she could not overhear conversations around her. They talked of sports and drink and abused each other about debts not paid, and she’d felt superior in her intellect. Then two of them near her had joked about a friend of theirs and his Master Bates, a conversation she knew instinctively to be sexual and bawdy, but that she could not understand. It caused the others to howl at a conclusion she never saw coming.

The economics lecture she’d grasped with no difficulty, but her lack of understanding of the joke stayed with her, humiliating proof of her ignorance. She had not even asked Frank to explain.

The painting of Blackstone and his mistress, that was the other grand joke on her. Everyone else had seen it and understood it, while she
remained an ignorant, helpless girl. Everyone else knew the joke she didn’t know.

With a distant flash and a low rumble of thunder, the rain arrived and drove the players from the field. For half an hour, everyone huddled under the awning, the boys in two groups at opposite ends of the tent, glumly watching the field.

The sky was clearing when Dubusari sought Violet’s attention. “I beg your pardon, Miss Hammersley, but his majesty is missing one of his medals, the Order of Saint Stephen. Could you ask your boys to look about them in the tent? I am sure it has fallen off somewhere.”

Violet did not miss the implication that her boys would know where to find the missing jewelry. Blackstone was at her side at once. “The prince likely dislodged the pin when he batted.” Blackstone’s hair was wind ruffled, and rain stuck the thin lawn of his sleeves to his arms, outlining the lean muscle and sinew there. His face wore rivulets of water, and the dark spikes of his lashes sparkled with drops.

For a moment Dubusari looked anything but gentle and polite. He looked menacing. Then Cahul dashed out into the downpour. They watched the bodyguard search the ground, and hold up his arm in triumph. He returned to the awning thoroughly soaked, the perfect loyal servant.

* * *

Nate made Kirby’s shop bell ring merrily as he entered. He couldn’t help a bit of a swagger. His trip to the neighborhood of the docks had paid off. He not yet spotted one of the prince’s people in Wapping, but today he had found an unlikely prize and tucked it in his pocket. He was on his way to Blackstone, but first he meant to show the thing to Miranda Kirby, just so that she’d know his work was important to the case.

As he entered, Viscount Hazelwood pushed away from leaning over Miranda’s counter. She looked up, consciousness of the intimacy of the moment with Hazelwood bright in her cheeks. She straightened and flicked Nate a cold glance. The shop was fragrant with the scent of the sandalwood shaving soap Miranda liked to show her customers.

“Young Wilde, you must have something to report.”

“I do, my lord.”

“Don’t ‘my lord’ me, Wilde. I think Goldsworthy has the two of us mixed up. It’s you he should be sending to dance at Almack’s while I take my disreputable self off to the lowest dives in Covent Garden.”

Miranda’s gaze grew icicles. “Don’t say so, Lord Hazelwood. You were not born for such disgraces. Nate Wilde knows his way around low places because he came from them.”

“My family would quite agree with you, Miss Kirby, nonetheless, I’ve courted disgrace, and she’s a willing mistress. Pardon me, I’ll take myself back to the club.”

Hazelwood was telling the truth whether Miranda believed him or not. He could dazzle her just by being a viscount, even in the rumpled, soiled clothes they had him wear. Goldsworthy’s uniform for Hazelwood was deliberately made of stained fabrics. Though the viscount had been sober for nearly a month, Goldsworthy didn’t want the world to know it. He wanted everyone to see the same man he’d plucked from a sponging house. Hazelwood had apparently had his first affair at eighteen and had drunk or gambled away all of his fortune except for the funds he’d put aside for his by-blows. His father, the Earl of Vange, had taken his son to court to ensure that Hazelwood would be a life tenant of his estate, and that the property would pass to his legitimate heir if he lived to have one.

But Miranda refused to credit any story about him that contradicted her idea of a gentleman to the manner born. She firmly insisted that Viscount Hazelwood could not have done the things said of him.

The shop door closed behind the viscount, and Nate took a moment to shake off any thoughts of his rival. Fate had cruelly put Miranda Kirby in his path just when he was making the most of opportunities that had come his way through the copper, Will Jones. She was exactly the sort of beauty he could not ignore. He hadn’t known, couldn’t have known at thirteen, as one of Bredsell’s boys, that a woman could have such a hold on a man. It was a curious but true fact that a certain tilt of a head, or the way that a chestnut curl bounced, or a bit of creamy softness under a chin or an arm, could stop a man in his path, make his mouth go dry and his brain turn to mush.

Now he had his work cut out for him to convince his fair Miranda that deeds, not birth, made the man. It was a campaign. Like a war, it could take years to win. At near twenty he was in no hurry. He had once met the great man, Lord Wellington, and he knew that Wellington had taken all of Spain and France from Napoleon one city at a time.

Nate’s current work put him at a bit of a disadvantage because he had to wear the rough clothes of the docks. Miranda liked her gentlemen with all the fine trimmings—wool coats and silk waistcoats and lace cuffs—he could manage those as well as any man in London, and it hadn’t been so hard. A man simply had to pay attention, to notice. Goldsworthy understood. A man of fashion made a good spy, after all, because he had a habit of noticing details. Being a Bredsell boy had trained Nate to notice looks and voices and a dozen gestures that gave away a man’s intentions. Will Jones had freed him from Bredsell and taught him to organize and analyze what he saw. And Goldsworthy had given him a new language to master, full of idiom—fashion.

Winning Miranda Kirby would take all his skills.

“Sorry I scared your admirer off.” He moved closer to Miranda’s counter.

“Lord Hazelwood doesn’t scare, and he’s not my admirer. We were just talking is all.” She fussed with the jars and bottles on the shelf behind the counter.

“I saw. It must get lonely in the shop.”

“Nate Wilde, are you trying to turn me up sweet?”

“Never. I was just thinking you might like to do more than whip up shaving lather. Maybe you’d like to take part in the work.” He leaned back with his elbows on Miranda’s counter.

“You mean the cases?”

He nodded, not looking at her. It was better not to let himself be distracted at the moment.

“Like going to be stung by bees? A lady can never go the places you go. It wouldn’t be right.”

“No bees. Just a chance to use your loaf.” He risked a glance at her.

She rolled her eyes. “My loaf! How you talk!”

“Do you want to?”

“Use my brain? As if I don’t every day.” She looked at him then. “What are you suggesting?”

“I have something that’s likely got a bearing on Lord Blackstone’s case. I thought you might like to take a look at it.” He waited. It was unfair to mention Blackstone, but he wasn’t going to play fair in this game.

“What is it?”

“Do you want to have a look?”

“You’re putting me on.”

“I’m not. You could help me figure out what to make of it.” He reached into his pocket for the prize he had tucked there, a Spanish banknote.

When the proprietor of the King Edward, a low drinking establishment, where Nate was keeping an eye on the dock neighborhood, had complained about the useless note, Nate had offered to take it off his hands. The fellow had been suspicious, but real money had made him willing to make the deal. Nate knew at once that a Spanish banknote was an odd possession for a local dockhand. Like the buttons, the note came from someone other than a common sailor, someone like Frank Hammersley. “Do you want to take a look?”

Miranda put aside the brush she was cleaning. “Very well then. I’ll help you.”

“Most gracious of you.” He grinned at her grand lady tone.

“What?”

“I found this particular item, so I get to say who sees it and under what terms.”

“What do you mean ‘terms’?”

“Terms.” He watched her, weighing the balance of curiosity and suspicion in her frown. “Say, if you were to let me touch you.”

He’d rendered her speechless. A rich red blush flooded her cheeks. Rude parts of him that could claim no gentlemanly manners at all responded instantly. He steadied himself. If she said no, she said no. A battle was not the whole campaign.