“You’ll be disappointed to hear that he’s nowherenearas good looking as I am.”
She laughed. “While that goes without saying...”
He grinned at her. “All jokes aside, allow me to put it like this: Mrs. Pariseau will love him.”
Their longtime resident Mrs. Pariseau was a handsome woman in her middle years who was thoroughly enjoying her relatively monied widowhood. Adventurous of spirit and intellect, she never wanted to be married again, but there was nothing she loved more than a gorgeous man, unless it was arcane discussion.
And, every now and then, fanning the usual spirited sitting room discourse into something close to bedlam.
They adored her and they did like to keep her happy.
“It’s for less than a fortnight, Angelique. What could happen? Mr. Marchand is nearly forty years old,” he half jested. “One foot in the grave.”
Lucien looped his arms around his wife and she settled into them with a sigh of resignation and contentment. He briefly rested his chin atop her golden-blond head.
They knew full well what kinds of mischief men that age could get up to without even trying. For instance, the Duke of Valkirk had acquired an unlikely scandalous opera singer wife at about that age as a result of living under their roof.
“But now I have to tell Delilah that you invited someone to stay without asking us first, and she won’t love that, Lucien. She’s kind and she’ll allow it, of course. I’ll do it, but I think you should apologize to her for forgetting. And we’ll still want to have a little chat with him first, as we do with every guest.”
“Fair enough,” he said equably. He kissed her forehead, she fussed a bit with his cravat to straighten it, and they went down to join the guests for the cheerful chaos that was dinner at the Grand Palace on the Thames.
The little white boardinghouse was tucked in among the other buildings at the docks like a princess among cutthroats. It was closing in on eleven o’clock at night by the time Marchand found it, but the lamp was still out on its hook.
He paused before the door and tipped his head back to watch the half circle of the moon slip out from behind a cloud. Still seemed like a magician’s trick to him, that, after all these years. He’d learned the difference between beautyand ugliness and between harmony and chaos thanks to the moon. It was the contrast between how he’d felt in his body when he looked up at it, and how he’d felt when looking at the squalor on the streets of St. Giles. Its soft, clean, remote glow had been the only lovely thing in his world for a long time.
Its light illuminated a rat fastidiously washing its little ears in the rivulets cascading from one of the modest gargoyles lining the roof edge. Nigh on twenty years ago, Marchand had gotten clean in much the same way, whenever he could. Small, hungry, dirty, frightened, perpetually, ferally vigilant and alone—he’d been a creature composed of instinct and nothing else, all his faculties forever pitched for threats. Certainly not superior to that resourceful rat.
How ironic that it had uniquely prepared him to be the ton’s latest obsession.
A haze of glamour and enigma surrounded him now. When he appeared on Lucifer’s Fall’s betting floor, the members turned toward him like weathervanes, straightening their spines, smoothing their hair, unsettled and excited. He circulated among them, distributing charm, solace, encouragement, wit, diplomacy, mediation, and, if necessary, some light menace. He remembered the names of wives, children, favorite liquors, mistresses. They craved his attention.
They all felt cherished, and they were all a little afraid of him.
Marchand hoarded details like currency. A clenched jaw or slumped shoulders, a gleam in an eye, a spring in a step—he took note of such things the way one might study the elements to forecast the weather. He knew when Lord Galworthy was about to cast his accounts, when Mr. Dunhill was about to take a swing at Mr. Grissom, when Sir Randolph had a brillianthand; he’d witnessed the furtive, tender looks and touches Lord Milton and Mr. Hanbury exchanged as they slowly fell in love. They were both married men, and they had children.
He judged no one.
This was less a magnanimity of character than a cynical—and almost heretical, given that he was English, and the English did love their classes—conviction that all men were the same under the skin. The only real difference between the ugliest of hells in which he had learned his trade and Lucifer’s Fall was the smell. Instead of vomit and sour ale and gin and the funk of the unwashed, it was now rich man musk: bay rum, starch, expensive tobacco, polished leather, brandy, and whiskey. They loosened their cravats and sweated through their shirts over the kinds of wagers that elevated heartbeats to just shy of apoplexy. But the shiny faces and avid bloodshot eyes were the same in every hell, as were the motives. Some did it for the money, others did it for the reason a child loves being pushed on a swing, for the giddy highs between the lows. Others did it in order to feel anything at all.
He didn’t care why they did it, as long as they did it in Lucifer’s Fall.
His dinner companion tonight, Lord Charton, could trace his family lineage back to William the Conqueror. He would have been both outraged and wounded to know that Marchand thought all men were the same under the skin. He had chattered nervously, unwittingly desperate to impress an orphaned bastard from St. Giles.
And all through the dinner, the word “specious” in Miss Guinevere Woodville’s voice had echoed in Marchand’s head.
Marchand knew a lot of words now, but good dictionariesremained outlandishly expensive and rare, so he didn’t know that one.
He had a bit of a weakness for clever, spiky women, and that was the only reason he’d indulged that girl at all today. He knew she was frightened, but Miss Woodville also had a dangerous amount of nerve. And while God only knew he’d had cause over the years to be grateful to women who traded sex for money, he’d rightly suspected the very notion of that would horrify her. He’d made his offer strategically to get her out of his office, and he had no regrets.
He could also have told Miss Woodville that sanctimony was a luxury of the comfortable. So-called morality quickly wentrightout the window when one was desperate. If her family was indeed penniless now thanks to her brother’s eventful night at Lucifer’s Fall, she’d learn this soon enough.
She might even learn that she, too, had a price.
But he was confident he’d never see her again.
Hats off to the girl for getting under his skin, he supposed.
But his encounter with Miss Woodville wasn’t the only reason his mood was edgy tonight. He always slept badly as a certain anniversary approached. It never failed to remind him that he’d gotten everything he needed and wanted a little too late for it to really matter, and that included Lucifer’s Fall. In his weaker moments he could not shake the sense that this meant he’d failed, after all.
