Vixen in Velvet (The Dressmakers 3)

“To tell you the truth, Dulcie, he don’t trust you much,” Meffat said.

“The last time I came to this theater, he trusted me enough to do the acting he wanted,” she said. “And then for only a few shillings, wasn’t it?”

“A few!” Meffat said. “You know it was all the ready money we had.”

“But you contrived to get more since you received my letter, I collect?” she said. “Because if you didn’t, you’ll place me in an awkward position.”

What she meant was, she’d place Theaker and Meffat in the awkward position. Theaker wished he’d let Meffat give her money and send her on her way when she’d first cornered him at the British Institution. But as one with some experience in the blackmail line, Theaker had felt sure she’d come back and make a nuisance of herself.

He’d decided it was cleverer to kill two birds with one stone: Take the wind out of Swanton’s sails and make Dulcie a partner in crime, so to speak. Who’d believe her, after she’d lied in front of all those people? She was an actress.

But he’d underestimated her audacity and her skill at double-dealing.

“You didn’t give us much time to raise the ready,” he said.

“I haven’t much time to give,” she said. “And no place to hide. In this”—she tapped the carpetbag with her foot—“is all we own, Bianca and I. Meanwhile I don’t know when one of Lord Lisburne’s detectives will knock at the door or spring out from an alley. Then it’ll be the lawyers and writs. If you wanted more time, you ought to have managed matters better for me.”

“If you’d been more discreet, you wouldn’t have this problem,” Theaker said.

“Were you discreet?” she said. “Did you not promise me there’d be no trouble? Did you not tell me that Lord Lisburne—”

“Hush,” Theaker said, looking about him. “That voice of yours carries, drat you.”

“If you want me to whisper, you’ll have to come nearer,” she said.

“Stop playing about,” Theaker said.

“Or what?” she said. “Would you be here if you knew a way to wiggle out of it? A little trickier, this, than wriggling out of what’s owing to your child.”

“Not mine,” Theaker said. “And if it was, I wouldn’t let anybody trick me into admitting it. Don’t know how you never saw what a conniver she was,” he told his friend. “But you couldn’t see beyond her pretty arse—and still can’t, by the looks of it.”

“Dash it, Theaker, the chit looks like me!” Meffat said. “You said it yourself. My eyes. My nose. You were the one told me to keep away the other night. You’re the one said all they needed to do was see me alongside the little gal and they’d never believe it was Swanton’s.”

“Will you hold your tongue!” Theaker said. “I vow, even now she turns you into a dithering idiot.”

“ ‘Love is merely a madness; and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip, as madmen do,’ ” she declaimed, becoming Rosalind again. “ ‘And the reason why they are not so punished and cured, is, that the lunacy is so ordinary, that the whippers are in love too.’ Do you still love me, John?”

“Ah, no, no, it was never like that,” he said. “You know it wasn’t, Dulcie. I never said that, did I, nor made promises.”

“He only wanted to bed you, and you knew it as well as he,” Theaker said.

“I was scarcely seventeen years old!”

“More like nineteen and pretending otherwise,” Theaker said. “Still, you’re older and wiser now, aren’t you?” He advanced to the stage and slapped down the coins. “There’s your five pounds. Do we need to escort you to a hackney to make sure we see the back of you?”

“No, I’ll take my daughter and be gone,” she said. She moved to the edge of the stage, but didn’t move to pick up the coins. “Only one thing—”

“Devil take you and the brat both!” Theaker said. “That’s as much as we could raise. Will you pick our pockets?”

She only smiled. “I only want to satisfy my curiosity. Why, of all the men in London you might have paid me to accuse falsely—”

“As to that, who’s to say who was the father?”

“But you know I wasn’t in France when he—”

“You might have been.”

“But I never was abroad. I’ve the handbills to prove it. In my scrapbook.” Again she tapped the carpetbag with her foot.

The jade was playing her own deep game with them, beyond a doubt. More money wanted. Or something else? Theaker looked about him and listened. The trouble was, as she’d said, Vauxhall was very noisy this night. Even with the theater doors closed, he could hear children shrieking outside. Drums and music, too. The walls muted the sound, but couldn’t shut it out altogether. The noise of the festivities outside made it difficult to distinguish untoward sounds inside the theater.

“Maybe we’d better see you on your way, after all,” Theaker said.

She gave the carpetbag another tap. “Hoping for a look inside? But it’s not in there. Not enough room. You’re welcome to look. I know John won’t mind peeping at my undergarments.”

Theaker started toward the stage. He reached up for the carpetbag. She kicked it out of reach.

He swore.

“So sorry to disappoint you, my good sir,” she said. “I find I’d rather you didn’t paw through my clothes. But don’t worry about the scrapbook. I gave it to a friend for safekeeping.”

Theaker stepped back a pace, chilled. “What friend, damn you?”

“That would be me,” came a woman’s voice from behind the closed curtain. It moved slightly, and the redheaded dressmaker stepped out onto the stage. She held a large scrapbook.

“Was this what you were looking for, Sir Roger?” she said.

For an instant, the two men stood stock still, jaws dropped. Their expressions were so perfectly theatrical that Leonie had all she could do not to laugh. Meffat’s face paled while Theaker’s turned an ugly red. Meffat seemed to recover his wits first, making a dash for the door through which they’d entered, but that way out was closed now. One of tonight’s performers, a circus strong man, guarded it.

“What’re you running away from?” Theaker said. “A French milliner? Nothing she can do to you. Nothing she can say that anybody’ll believe. All the world knows she’s a—”

“You might want to stop and think before you complete that sentence,” Lisburne said as he stepped out from behind the curtain.

Theaker retreated a pace and looked about him. It was plain enough to see he had no easy way out. He could either surrender or brazen it out.

Leonie was betting on the latter. He was a bully, after all.

His color darkened another shade, and his voice grew louder. “You here, too, then? No surprise. Got you by the round, wrinkly ones, has she?”

Leonie shot Lisburne a glance, but he only smiled. Had Theaker a grain of sense, he’d hold his tongue, seeing that smile.

But no.

“Thinking of going the way of Clevedon and Longmore?” Theaker went on. “Might want to think again. Any idea who your pretty vixen is, really? Who any of them are, her and her scheming sisters?” He laughed. “What a joke! You see what this is, Meffat? Desperate measures. They’ve got nothing. What do you care about Dulcie’s rubbishy scrapbook? How often do they print the year on a handbill? It’s all a hoax, don’t you see? Their word against yours.”

Clevedon’s voice came from behind the curtains. “Newspapers print the year.” He stepped out from behind the curtains. “Mrs. Williams received laudatory reviews in the Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, the Bristol Mercury, and other English newspapers during the years she was supposedly in France.”

Theaker’s color faded abruptly, as well it might, but he kept up the bluster. “You’re in trouble now, Dulcie,” he said. “Making scandal for an aristocrat. They’ll throw you i

n a cell and forget you.” He folded his arms. “If you were hoping to terrify me, Your Grace, you’re headed for disappointment.”

“We heard you admit to paying Mrs. Williams to accuse Lord Swanton of fathering and abandoning her child,” Clevedon said. He nodded toward the others on stage. “All of us heard it.”

“You heard. Hah. What did you hear or imagine you heard? A little playing about with Dulcie. The only proof you’ve got is that she lied.”

“You admitted to paying her to lie about Lord Swanton,” Leonie said.

“Did I? Don’t recollect.”

“You admitted it in the hearing of witnesses,” Leonie said.

“Not the most reliable witnesses, I’d say,” Theaker said. “You three have an interest in protecting Lord Swan-About. On the other side is everybody who saw Dulcie say it was him and no other who got the brat on her. If she lied then, she’ll lie again. Probably don’t know who the father is. She’ll blame anybody.”

He tipped his hat in a mocking salute. “Most entertaining, gentlemen, ladies.” He started toward Meffat. “But if there’s nothing further, Meffat and I will be on our way . . .” He trailed off as he saw Meffat’s expression change. The latter’s eyes widened and his mouth fell open.

“What the devil are you gawking at?” Theaker said. He must have heard the sound behind him then, because he turned back to the stage.

The curtain slowly rose, revealing Lords Herringstone, Geddings, and Flinton, as well as Lord Valentine Fairfax, Messrs. Bates, Crawford, Hempton . . . and Tom Foxe, of Foxe’s Morning Spectacle. The last had a shorthand notebook in his hand, in which he was busily scribbling.