Devilish Lord, Mysterious Miss

He stumbled to a halt on the pavement opposite what turned out to be a modiste’s. A very high-class modiste with the name ‘Madame Pichot’ picked out in gold leaf on a signboard above the door.

His heart was hammering in his chest, which was still heaving with shortened breath. What was he to do now? Barge into the shop, which probably wasn’t even open to customers yet, and demand they let him speak to the ghost he’d just seen take refuge inside? They would call for the watch, and have him locked up. In an asylum for the insane, most like.

He bent over, his hands resting on his knees as he fought to get his breath back. And make some sense of what had just happened.

Why, for God’s sake, had Cora fled from him, the very moment she had finally deigned to let him see her? And what was the significance of bringing him here?

He straightened up, staring at the shop front as though it might provide him with some answer to this unholy muddle.

‘Evening gowns a speciality’, read a card prominently displayed in the window, underneath a sample of the fabulously intricate beadwork that had become all the rage amongst the fashionable this year.

And a cold thread of foreboding slithered down his spine.

The very night after Mr Winters had declared his intention to lay Cora’s ghost to rest for good, the first night he’d had a run of such spectacularly bad hands even he could do nothing with them, he had partnered a woman wearing a dress that came from this modiste. He had laid the blame for their defeat at whist at the feet of the woman wearing the expensive gown, a French chit, who had as little grasp of the game as she had of the English language. But in his heart he had known she had nothing to do with his wins or losses.

All gamblers were superstitious, but he supposed he must be the most superstitious of the lot. Knowing Cora’s influence to be the source of his success, he had taken great pains, from the first day he had sensed her presence, to avoid offending her. He never touched strong liquor, nor did he succumb to the lures cast out by women who were fascinated by his aura of dark menace. How could he have contemplated bedding anyone, even if any woman had ever stirred him on any level, knowing that Cora hovered not far away, watching his every move? Not that she would have watched for long. Her puritanical soul would have been so shocked, she would have fled, perhaps never to return.

He had been right to take care. Cora’s love was so strong it had reached out to him from beyond the grave. But a love strong enough to cheat death was not a force to be trifled with.

Miss Winters had kissed him, her father had begun to search for lawyers cunning enough to lay her spirit in the grave for good, and Cora had turned her back on him. And getting blind drunk, and shouting curses up at Miss Winters’s windows, had not done him any favours. That slamming door was a clear enough message that even he could read it.

She had put back the barrier that existed between the living and the dead. And she was on the other side.

He ran a shaky hand over his face, feeling sick to his stomach.

He had only survived the last seven years because she had been right there with him. More real to him than all the gibbering idiots who populated the hells he frequented.

Would she come back to him, he wondered frantically, if he proclaimed the truth about her? He would not care if they declared him insane, and locked him up. He could afford to pay for a nice, cosy cell. It would almost be a relief to stop pretending his life made any sense. To stop hiding the anguish that tortured him night and day. He could just lie in the dark, and rant and curse to his heart’s content.

Mr Winters would surely abandon his ambition to have his daughter marry a peer, if that peer was a raving lunatic! And even Robbie would reap some benefit. It would appease his quest for justice, to see the man he believed had murdered his sister finally locked away.

If that was what it took to appease Cora, he decided, his jaw firming, then it would be a small price to pay!

‘You wanter cross or not, mister?’a little voice piped up, jerking him out of his darkly disturbing thoughts.

‘Cross?’

A ragged boy with a dirty broom was standing, palm outstretched, gazing up at him expectantly.

A crossing sweeper.

‘No,’ he replied. There was no point.

No point to anything, any more. He had offended Cora. Driven her away.

‘Want me to see if I can get a message to her?’ the lad persisted.

‘Message?’

‘To the red-haired piece you chased up the street.’

‘You saw her?’ Lord Matthison stared at the boy in shock. He had assumed he was the only one who had been able to see her. Especially after the way she had melted through the crowds as though she and they existed on different planes.

The boy leaned closer, and took an experimental sniff, his perplexed face creasing into a grin.

‘Clearer than you, I reckon, by the smell of your breath. Had a heavy night, have yer?’

Lord Matthison grimaced as the lad’s words sank in.

He had not taken a drink in seven years. Had been astounded by what a tolerance for gin he seemed to have, marvelling at the fact he was still on his feet. Well, he might be on his feet, but he was sure as hell not sober.

The woman was real. He had not called some spirit up out of the pit. Cora had not deliberately turned her back on him, run from him, and slammed the door in his face. He had just seen some servant girl climb up the area steps from the servants’entrance, and go about her legitimate business.

Which had nothing to do with him.

The fact that she had looked uncannily like Cora was mere coincidence. Or…had she even born that much of a resemblance to his late fiancée? He frowned. He had not been close enough to see her face clearly. It had been her build, and the way she walked, that had convinced him he was seeing a ghost.

His head began to ache.

Typical!

He was getting a hangover before he was even sober.

He pressed the heels of his hands over his eyes, digging his fingers into his scalp. There was no point in trying to make sense of any of this until he had sobered up.

‘Is this your patch?’ he asked the crossing sweeper, running his fingers through his hair.

‘Yessir!’ said the lad, rather too loudly for Lord Matthison’s liking.

‘Then find out whatever you can about the red-head,’ he said, dipping into his pocket, and flipping the lad a coin, ‘and I shall give you another of these.’

The boy’s face lit up when he saw it was a crown piece. ‘Right you are! When will you be coming back?’

‘I shall not,’he replied with a grimace of distaste. He despised men who loitered on street corners, hoping to catch a glimpse of the hapless female that was currently the object of their prurient interest.

‘You will report to my lodgings. What is your name?’

‘Grit,’ said the boy, causing Lord Matthison to look at him sharply. And then press his fingers to his throbbing temples. It was all of a piece. The boy he was employing to spy on Cora’s ghost could not possibly have a sensible name like Tom, or Jack! Everything about this night bore all the hallmarks of a nightmare.

‘I will tell my manservant, then, that if a short, dirty person answering to the name of Grit comes knocking, that he is to admit you. Or, if I am not there, to extract what information you have, and reward you with another coachwheel.’

‘And who might you be?’

‘Lord Matthison.’

He watched the light die from the boy’s eyes. Saw him swallow. Saw him try to hide his consternation. But Grit was too young to quite manage to conceal the belief he had just agreed to serve the devil’s minion. He kissed goodbye to the prospect of ever finding out anything about the red-head who had worked him up into such a state. The lad would never pluck up the courage to venture to his lodgings. Or if he did, his conscience was bound to hold him in check. Even a dirt-poor guttersnipe would think twice about selling information about a defenceless female to a man of Lord Matthison’s reputation.

‘In the meantime, perhaps you could find me a cab,’ he drawled, eyeing the shop across the street one last time.And then, because he got a perverse kind of pleasure from playing up to the worst of what people expected of him, he added, ‘I dislike being abroad in daylight.’

Chapter Two

Mary dashed across the main shop, through the velvet curtains that divided it from the working areas, and pounded up the three flights of stairs that led to the workroom. The one place where she had learned to feel secure.

She had no idea why the way that man had emerged from the shadows on the other side of Curzon Street, with his black clothes, black hair and forbidding expression, had shaken her so badly. Or why, for an instant, she had got the peculiar impression that the shadows themselves had thickened, solidified and spawned the living embodiment of her nightmares.

It was terrifying, though, to feel as if your nightmares had invaded your waking life. Particularly since those nightmares were so vague.

All she could remember when she woke up from one of them was that there had been something hovering behind her. Something she dared not turn and face. Because she was sure that if she did, it would rear up and swallow her whole. And so she would curl up, trying to make herself disappear, so the Thing would not notice her. But she could always feel it coming nearer and nearer, its shadow growing bigger and bigger, until eventually, in sheer terror, she would leap up and try to run away.

In her dreams, she never managed to move one step. But her legs would always start to thrash around the bed.

‘Wake up, Mary,’ one of the other girls would complain, prodding her with their sharp elbows. ‘You’re having one of your dreams again.’

They would tell her to lie still, and she would, clutching the sheets to her chin, staring up at the ceiling, terrified to close her eyes lest the dream stalked her again.

She sighed, rubbing the heels of her hands against her eyes. Deep down she knew that shadows did not turn into men, and chase girls down the street.

Though it had not stopped her running from him.

Just as she fled from whatever it was that stalked her dreams.

‘Mary!’The angry voice of her employer made every girl in the workroom jump to attention. The fact that Madame Pichot had left her office at this hour of the morning did not bode well for any of them.

‘What is the matter with you now? You are as white as a sheet! You are not going to be ill again, are you?’

Mary could not blame her for looking so exasperated. She was nowhere near as robust as the other girls who sewed for Madame. Never had been.

‘That doctor promised me that if you took regular walks, your constitution would improve,’Madame complained. ‘I cannot afford for you to take to your bed at this time of year!’Although the workload had slackened off slightly, now that the presentations in the Queen’s drawing rooms had mostly taken place, there were still enough orders coming in for Madame to keep her girls working from dawn till they dropped into bed from sheer exhaustion.

Madame Pichot stalked across the bare floor and laid her hand on Mary’s forehead.

‘I am n-not ill,’ Mary stammered, as much alarmed now by Madame’s censure, as by what had happened in the street. ‘B-but there w-was a m-man…’

Madame Pichot rolled her eyes, raising her hands to the ceiling in one of her Gallic expressions of exasperation. ‘The streets are always full of men. I am sure none of them would be interested in a little dab of nothing like you!’ she snapped, tugging off Mary’s gloves, and untying her bonnet ribbons.

‘N-no, he was shouting,’ Mary exclaimed, recalling that fact for the first time herself.

‘There are a lot of men hawking their wares at this time of the morning,’ Madame scoffed. ‘He wasn’t shouting at you.’

‘But I think he was,’ she murmured, trying to examine what had happened without letting the panic that had gripped her on the street from clouding her perception. ‘He chased me!’ Though why some man she had never seen before should suddenly take it into his head to pursue her, shouting angrily, she could not imagine. But she had definitely seen him roughly pushing a tradesman out of his way. With his vengeful, dark eyes fixed on her. And for one awful moment, it had felt as though the curtain that separated what was real, from what existed only in her head, had been ripped in two. She had not known where she was. Or who she was.

That had been the most frightening moment of all.

‘Mary, really,’ Madame said, tugging her to her feet, and undoing her coat buttons, while the other girls in the workroom began to snigger, ‘just because you saw a man running in the street, does not mean he was chasing you. Who on earth would want to chase a scrawny little creature like you, when there are willing, pretty girls for sale on every street corner?’

It should have been reassuring to hear Madame repeat the very fact that had her so bewildered. Except that she knew he had been chasing her. Her.

‘Now, Mary,’ said Madame firmly, shoving her back down on her work stool, and thrusting her spectacles into her hands, ‘I forbid you to have one of your turns. There is no time for it today. Not when you have the bodice for the Countess of Walton’s new gown to finish. Whatever happened outside, you must put it out of your head. Do you hear me?’

‘Yes, Madame.’ In truth, there was nothing she wanted more than to put it out of her mind. She was really glad she had such a complicated piece of work to do today. For concentrating on making something utterly beautiful had always had the power to keep her demons at bay. Even when she had been a little girl…

With a startled cry, Mary dropped her glasses. It always gave her a jolt, when one of these little glimpses of a past that was mostly a complete blank flared across her consciousness without warning.

Hearing Madame’s huff of disapproval, Mary dropped to her knees to grope for them. They would not have slid far along the rough planks of the workroom. She would find them in mere seconds, pick them up, and be quickly able to get on with her work.

Why, she thought in anguish, could her mind not be as nimble as her fingers? Whenever she tried to catch hold of one of these little slivers of light that flashed into her mind, it was just like trying to take hold of a candle flame. There was nothing of any substance to latch on to. Except pain.

Well, only an idiot would keep on putting their hand into a flame, once they had learned that it burned, she thought, hooking her glasses over her ears. Instantly, everything beyond a few feet from her went out of focus, isolating her on her stool, like a shipwrecked mariner, clinging to a lone rock shrouded by fog.

When she had been a little girl, she sighed, unable to silence the echo of that memory straight away. Hastily she picked up a needle, but not fast enough to blot out the feeling that when she had been a little girl…with her head dutifully bent over her needlework…

‘Pay no mind to anything but your sampler,’ she heard a gentle voice telling her. And for a fleeting moment, it was not Madame standing over her, glowering, but a kindly, protective presence that she instinctively recognised as her mother.

‘For the Lord’s sake, keep your head down,’ the voice…her mother…continued as she became aware there had been someone else with them. Looming over them. A man with a loud voice and hard fists…and fear rushed up to swamp her.

Past and present swirled and merged. The child in her bent over her sampler, to blot out the raised voices of the adults, the violence that hovered in the air. And the woman hitched her stool closer to her embroidery frame. She leant so close her nose was practically brushing the cream silk net so that every time she breathed in, her lungs were filled with the sweet, aromatic scent of brand new cloth. With fingers that shook, she threaded a string of tiny crystal droplets on to her bead needle. Then she took a second needle which she would use to couch down the tiny segments of beading. She bent all her powers of concentration on to the intricate work, deliberately pushing away the vague images of violence that had almost stepped fully formed, into the light, just as that dark man had done earlier.

She had become adept at pushing uncomfortable thoughts away since she had arrived in London, bruised, alone and scared. And soon, her world shrank until all she could feel was the texture of the luxurious fabric, all she could hear was the pluck of the needle piercing it, the hiss of the thread as she set each meticulously measured stitch.

Her breathing grew steadier. Her heart beat evenly again. All that was ugly and mean slithered back into the shadows, leaving Mary conscious only of the work that occupied her hands.

She sensed, rather than heard, Madame Pichot step away. They both knew that now Mary’s mind had turned in a new direction, she would soon forget all about the alarming incident in Berkeley Square.

It had been a long time since Lord Matthison had played against the house. The owners of gambling hells, such as this one, had become reluctant to admit him, until he had restricted his play to private games, arranged for him with other gentlemen. Or men who called themselves gentlemen, he corrected himself as he glanced round the table at the flushed faces of Lord Sandiford, Mr Peters, and a young cub by the name of Carpenter who was looking distinctly green about the gills.

Peters fumbled with his cards, reached for a drink, then, seeing his glass was empty, called for a refill from a passing waiter.

Lord Matthison leaned back in his chair with a sneer. Taking yet another drink was not going to alter the fact that once Peters threw down his hand, he would have cleaned them all out.

His mockery turned inwards. Had he not discovered for himself how deceptive strong drink could be? Thinking he had summoned up Cora’s ghost, by muttering something about three times three indeed! As soon as he’d sobered up, he had realised that the vision he’d had of Cora had sprung like a genie from a bottle, formed from a heady mixture of gin fumes and wishful thinking.

He had not been able to bear the thought he might have lost her all over again, that was what it boiled down to. And so he had let the gin steer him down a path of self-delusion.

Just as brandy was steering Peters down the path of self-destruction, he reflected, as the man gulped down what the waiter had just poured.

The man would have done better to stick to coffee, as he had done, he mused, as Peters, with a defiant flourish, finally displayed his hand.

Then slumped back when he saw what Lord Matthison had been holding.

‘One more hand,’ he begged, as Lord Matthison reached for his winnings.

‘You have nothing left to stake,’ Lord Matthison replied coldly.

‘I have a daughter,’ the man interjected, his eyes fastened on the pile of coins, banknotes and hastily scrawled pledges Lord Matthison was sweeping into his capacious pockets.

Lord Matthison regarded him with contempt. ‘Do you expect me to care?’

If Peters had a grain of worth in him, he would have been at home, managing his business, not wasting his substance in a gaming hell like this! He should have considered what it might mean to his daughter before he gambled it all away. It was no use appealing to him now.

His own father had been just the same. When gambling fever gripped him, he forgot all about his wife and son, the dependants who looked to him for their welfare. All that had mattered to him was the next turn of the card, the next roll of the dice.

‘No, no!’ the man gibbered. ‘I am saying that I still have a daughter—’ a nasty look spread across his face ‘—to stake. Just give me one last chance to win something back,’ he begged.

‘Out of the question,’ he replied, despising the man who had just ruined himself.

‘She’s pretty. And still a virgin,’ Peters gabbled, sweat breaking out on his florid face.

Lord Sandiford, who had gone down to the tune of four hundred guineas without batting an eyelid, sniggered. ‘You are wasting your time there, old man. Better sell her outright to me. Lord Matthison has no use for women.’

‘Not living ones,’ he agreed, shooting a pointed look at the hell’s newest hostess, who had been hovering by his shoulder all night. At one point, he had found her perfume so cloying that he had told her quite brusquely to move further off. She had pouted, and looked up at him from under half-closed lids, purring that she would await his pleasure later.

‘What do you mean by that?’ demanded Peters.

Everyone at the table fell silent. Very few people had ever dared ask Lord Matthison whether there was any truth in the rumours circulating about him.

Mr Carpenter shot Lord Sandiford a look of disgust, which turned to loathing as his eyes swept past Lord Matthison, got up so quickly his chair overturned, and made hastily for the exit.

‘The only woman I am interested in, Mr Peters,’ Lord Matthison replied, choosing his words very carefully, ‘is Miss Cora Montague.’ He felt a ripple of shock go round the room as he finally spoke her name aloud in public. Several men at nearby tables twisted round in their seats, hoping to hear some new titbit about the scandal that had rocked society seven years earlier.

‘In her case, I was willing to stake my very soul on just one throw of the dice,’ he said enigmatically. ‘And I lost it.’He got to his feet, wondering whether proclaiming his allegiance to her ghost in a hell-hole like this would be enough to entice her back to his side.

What had he got to lose?

‘She has my soul, Mr Peters.’And then, considering the massive amount he had just won tonight, his breath quickened. Even though he had not felt her presence, his luck had definitely turned. ‘Or perhaps,’ he added, feeling as though a great weight had rolled from his shoulders, ‘I have hers.’

The girl who had been trying to get his attention all night was standing by the door. The owner of the hell was holding her by the arm, and talking to her in an urgent undertone.

Lord Matthison pulled out a banknote and waved it under her nose.

‘Still think you’d like to earn this?’ he taunted her.

She shrank back, her face turning pale as the owner of the hell moved away, leaving her alone with him. Lord Matthison put the money back in his pocket.

‘Clearly not,’ he drawled. ‘Very wise of you.’

It was a relief to get out into the street, and breathe air not tainted by cigar fumes and desperation. ‘Did you see that, Cora?’ he asked of the black-velvet shadows of the alleyway. ‘Did you hear me tell them?’

But there was no reply. She did not come skipping to his side, to keep him company on the long walk home. Instead, he had a fleeting image of what that nameless daughter would feel like when Peters went home and told her he was going to sell her to Sandiford. Swiftly followed by the horrified look on the face of that woman he had mistaken for Cora two days before.

‘It is not my fault Peters tried to sell his daughter to me,’ he growled as he set off through the dark, damp streets. ‘I only went to the tables to find you.’

But she had not been there. And so the money that was making his coat pockets bulge meant nothing to him. He had no use for it.

When he reached his rooms, he drew out all the banknotes that had formed part of the winning pot and thrust them into his manservant’s hands.

‘I ruined a man named Peters tonight,’ he bit out. ‘Take this money, and hand it over into the keeping of his daughter. Tell her she is not to let her father get hold of it. Or she will have me to answer to.’

‘Sir.’ Ephraims’s eyebrows rose a fraction, but he went straight out, without asking any questions.