“Has she made a new life?” Clara said.
“She married one of the stablemen. She takes in laundry and mending. She helps at the inn. Hard work, but easier than what she used to do. Safer, too, and better conditions overall: regular meals, a roof over her head, and a man who treats her well. She’s a help to him and to the inn in other ways. She’s good at spotting potential troublemakers, a survival skill acquired during her previous career. She was about to report the boy when she saw me come out to speak to her husband.”
“I could not understand a word she said,” Clara said. “It sounded like a proposition, and I did wonder at her boldness—when I was sitting in the carriage, not easy to overlook.”
“She used that tone to keep our spy from suspecting she’d been spying on him.” Radford gave a short laugh. “This hasn’t been the most romantic evening, but at least we’ve had an entertaining game of cat and mouse.”
“It seemed romantic to me,” Clara said.
“What, half of Richmond descending on the Talbot Inn to get a close look at my bride? The servants seizing every thin excuse to visit our private dining parlor, though the innkeeper himself insisted on attending us?”
“It was romantic because we played cat and mouse with our watcher,” Clara said. “And because you assumed I’d enjoy the game, too.”
And because he’d told her during dinner what he was thinking, and what theories he formulated about the boy. Because he listened to her theories and answered her questions without calling her simpleminded more than once or twice, and then with the affectionate humor that warmed her.
“I knew you’d object to being kept out of it,” he said.
“What did she say, then?”
“She noticed him because he behaved suspiciously. He’d kept to the darkest parts of the yard, but at one point a carriage drove in and the lantern light caught him. He was small and thin—a runt, like a thousand other boys she’s known. She said he had a pronounced misalignment of his jaw—”
“Pronounced misalignment? Millie said that?”
“I translated,” he said. “She sketched his profile in the air with her finger and said he had a rat face, from which I deduced buck teeth. But he had very full cheeks. As she put it, ‘He looked like he was saving nuts in them.’ Though he was better dressed than boys from her old London neighborhoods, she said he was one of their kind. When she saw him scurry to hide behind a wagon when I came out, she arrived at a logical conclusion.”
“Whoever he is, if he’s kept it up for all this time, at night, in this cold, one may assume he isn’t doing it for fun,” Clara said. “He’s doing it for pay or hasn’t a choice.”
“I’d rather see him for myself,” Radford said. “The description fits no boy I ever met. There are thousands I haven’t met—though I do wonder why he seems familiar.”
“He could be someone you saw in passing and had no reason to pay attention to.”
He shrugged. “Possibly. If he follows us to the house, I’ll accost him. By now he’ll be tired and cold. Hungry, too, unless he carried food with him. Even so, cold and fatigue would be enough to slow him.”
But within a few minutes of their leaving the inn, Radford said, “He’s gone.”
Clara knew better than to ask, Are you sure? She said, “I was looking forward so much to your accosting and interrogating him. I would have helped.”
“Despair not, O queen of all realms of my life,” Radford said. “Maybe he’ll be back tomorrow. Tonight, meanwhile, I believe I’ll interrogate you—quite closely—instead.”
That night
She made him wait.
Radford’s bride wanted a long soak in a hot bath, she said. She suggested he read a book.
Clearly his lady needed no instructions for developing her skills in the marital arts. The undisciplined being who lived in his brain quivered with anticipation.
Banishing the overeager inner self, he took a leisurely bath, too.
No reason in the world to hurry. They had all the night ahead of them.
He could use the time to plan—and not think about the blasted boy, their shadow. Nothing could be done about him tonight, and it was a waste of mental energy to think about him. He pushed Millie’s runt with the stuffed cheeks into one of the cupboards of his mind and shut and locked the door. His lady offered a far more agreeable topic for meditation.
After his bath, he donned a dressing gown and slippers and, shockingly, nothing else.
She might wear all the clothes she liked. All the more fun taking them off.
He made his way to their place of rendezvous, the sitting room, and thought about taking her clothes off and how best to accomplish this and what else he could do to keep things interesting.
Eventually their supper arrived. It was the light collation she’d asked for: cold meats and pastries, fruit and cheese and such. A footman, having erased his face of all expression, set it out on a small table by the fire. When he’d arranged everything to a nicety, he quietly vanished.
Radford got up and replaced one chair with a cushioned one. He collected other cushions and placed them nearby. This was something he preferred to do himself. In fact, he preferred to do most things himself.
That would have to change, a bit.
Among other things, he’d need more servants in his married life. He didn’t mind the expense. Firstly, it was for Clara’s benefit. Secondly, he could afford it without hardship. Not a ducal retinue, but a handful, certainly. What he minded was having them underfoot.
Still, his father had adapted. So could the son. He was willing to be civilized. To a point.
Clara entered the sitting room, and for a moment he stopped breathing.
She wore a cream-colored lot of froth, nothing like a normal dressing gown. He supposed the nightdress under it was even more abnormal, thanks to the French dressmakers. Though it covered her completely, with ruffles and lace at the neck and fluttering down the front opening—which fastened with ribbon ties, he noted—the fabric was thin and the cut cunningly devised to show all the glorious contours of her body.
“Do you think that’s entirely fair?” he said, gesturing at her.
“Don’t you like it?” she said.
“Let me see. Turn around. Slowly.”
She did. He swallowed a groan. And another.
When she faced him again, she gave two slow, sleepy blinks and said, “What do you think?”
He said. “Very nice. Let’s take it off.”
Clara had gone to a great deal of trouble getting into the ensemble. That was to say, Davis had done all the tying and hooking and muttering about French dressmakers.
It took Radford very little time to get it off, though he never seemed to hurry. But his hands—those clever, agile hands—worked so quickly and smoothly. In two heartbeats, it seemed, she was wearing nothing at all. Then he sank to his knees . . . and down, further . . . and then it was his tongue and his hands on her bare skin, teasing and heating her. Her knees weakened and her legs shook, and he said gruffly, “Perhaps your ladyship would like to sit down
.”
She’d like to lie down, but the chair was nearest and her knees were buckling, and she dropped into it and gasped, “Good heavens.”
He returned his mouth and tongue and hands to their work. Soon her spine gave way, and she began to slide from the chair. As she began to sink helplessly downward, he pulled nearby cushions onto the floor for her to land on.
She said voice as thick as her mind, “I’m not sure I can survive this. Oh!”
“I promised to worship you with my body,” he said. “I said it in front of everybody.”
His tongue, his wicked tongue. His hands, his artful hands.
He made every inch of her quiver, inside and outside. He caressed her and kissed her. He suckled her and she thought she’d scream with the pleasure of it and the madness, too, knocking away all her lady-ness and the veneer of civilization and letting loose a wanton.
And at last, when she thought she’d die of wanting him, he gave himself to her. His body joined hers, and he moved with her in the way that now seemed so completely right and natural, the union of body and soul she’d been waiting for all her life. She’d had only the dimmest sense, before, of what she’d been waiting for. But she had it now, she knew.
With my body I thee worship. Yes, he’d said that yesterday. Was it only yesterday?
And this is forever, she thought, the last coherent though she had. Then the moment came, the peak of joy she’d so recently discovered, and she swam into forever, and floated there, in his arms, until she drifted into a sweet, soft darkness, and slept.
A maid had delivered their morning coffee and cleared away last night’s debris, and Radford had expected to go down to breakfast, as one usually did.
But shortly after the maid, the footman reappeared, this time with breakfast. He set it on the table before the fire, reinvigorated the fire, and departed.
Clara, emerging from her dressing room in a more demure dressing gown than she’d worn last night, said, “Oh, how kind of your mother.” She blushed. “She wanted us to have a bit more privacy.”