Your Scandalous Ways (Fallen Women 1)

The man who was trouble retrieved the jewelry case from the table in the portego where he’d tossed it shortly after leaving madame and a moment before Magny appeared. This time James didn’t pause but continued through the archway, and down the stairs to the andron.

He fixed his attention on his surroundings, taking in every detail. Though he’d come this way before, it was the first time he’d done so in broad day. He could only hope his years of training had survived the tempest that was Francesca Bonnard, and he’d remember, once he calmed down, every detail of the rooms he’d passed through this day. He had to hope that some part of his mind had paid attention, while the rest of it was roiling with anger, jealousy, lust, frustration, and several other emotions he’d rather not examine too closely.

If all else failed, he’d have to search the house. In such a case, it was best to have a mental picture of the likeliest hiding places. Searching, however, was the method he’d hoped to avoid. On the occasions when he had to turn burglar, he preferred to know exactly where to find what he was looking for.

That was not the case here. Though, like other Venetian palazzi, hers was fairly simply laid out, the house was large, containing all too many possible hiding places. With most people, he could easily deduce where they’d keep precious items, once he understood how their minds worked. The trouble was, he could not unscramble the workings of a woman’s mind while she was scrambling his.

He swiftly made his way to his waiting gondola. Sedgewick and Zeggio, who’d been talking softly, looked up at the same time. Both faces were wary.

They think I’ve taken leave of my senses, James thought, and they’re not wrong.

He told Zeggio to take them to the island of San Lazzaro.

James needed to clear his head, and he was sure that would happen more quickly once he was out on the water, several miles from Venice—and from her. The tiny island, once a haven for lepers, was now home to the Armenian monastery where Byron had studied.

A monastery, at the moment, sounded like heaven.

Chapter 8

Oh Pleasure! you are indeed a pleasant thing,

Although one must be damn’d for you,

no doubt:

I make a resolution every spring

Of reformation, ere the year run out,

But somehow, this my vestal vow takes wing,

Yet still, I trust it may be kept throughout:

I’m very sorry, very much ashamed,

And mean, next winter, to be quite reclaimed.

Lord Byron

Don Juan, Canto the First

“You should not have come,” Francesca again told Magny as she emerged from the dressing room.

He’d left the window and planted himself on a chair in the boudoir. His hands folded upon the elaborate gold knob of the walking stick propped between his legs, he glowered at the floor.

“I hear things,” he said. “They make me think you’ve taken leave of your senses.”

“You are at liberty to think what you like.”

She walked to the writing desk she often used as a receptacle for odds and ends of jewelry, scarves, gloves, creams, and lotions. She sank into the chair, and hunted through the bric-a-brac for her note paper and pen. “I will not allow any man to rule me. If that was what I’d wanted, I’d have remarried.”

“Thérèse, do gather up those pearls and put them away properly,” he said. “For God’s sake, Francesca, let the girl tend to your jewelry. What has come over you, to make you so careless?”

Look at the way you treat those pearls, those splendid pearls, Cordier had said. I’m not one of your baubles. You won’t use me as you use your jewelry. I won’t be used, to prove whatever it is you want to prove, and cast aside.

Men used women, but when the tables were turned…oh, that was another matter altogether. That was a capital crime.

“Take them,” Francesca told her maid. Though Thérèse ignored the count, she was no doubt itching to do as he commanded.

Francesca pushed a jar of powder aside. “Ah, there’s a pen.” She took it up, separated the inkwell from the other little jars and bottles, and cleared a space on the table. She found a few sheets of note paper under a scarf.

Magny knew better than to ask to whom she was writing. He knew she’d only tell him it was none of his affair.

“I understand they’ve caught one of the men,” he said after a moment’s thunderous silence.

“Footpads,” she said. She shuddered involuntarily. She gave a short laugh to conceal it. “Or are they floatpads in Venice?”

“It does not amuse me,” he said.

She shrugged. “They’d heard of my jewelry. That’s what they wanted—and to entertain themselves by tormenting a helpless woman.”

“Is that what the governor believes? Is that what you believe?”

She paused, the pen in midair. She turned and looked at him. “The man was already in custody,” she said. “He’s sure to be executed. Why should he lie? What had he to lose by telling the truth?”

“I don’t know. I cannot help thinking it had to do with that business earlier in the summer.”

“Lord Quentin,” she said grimly. She turned back to her note.

She didn’t know how Quentin had learned about the letters she’d taken from the locked drawer in her former husband’s desk. She didn’t know how Quentin had obtained the fragment he’d shown her, so startlingly like those she had. It sounded, however, as though he’d made the discovery not very long ago.

The matter has puzzled us for some time, he told her. But it was only recently that we’ve begun putting the puzzle pieces together.

The puzzle pieces indicated that Elphick was what she’d suspected him to be five years ago: a man who worked for his country’s enemies. But five years ago no one would have believed her. With the appalling accusations he’d made during the divorce, he’d destroyed her credibility—that was to say, what little credibility remained, after her father had swindled half the Beau Monde.

Her own lawyers, to whom she’d shown one of the letters, had told her they’d do her more harm than good, either during the criminal conversation case John had brought against her lover, Lord Robert Meadows, or during the divorce proceedings. John’s lawyers would have no trouble making people believe the letters were the inventions of a vindictive, amoral woman.

They’d had no trouble, she’d discovered, making the world believe the worst of her, in any case. Her father had made that all too easy for them.

She’d not been without sin, true. She’d served her faithless spouse as he’d served her. But no one cared about a man’s infidelities, even when they were beyond counting. Meanwhile, by the time John was done poisoning everybody’s mind, her one spot of mud—one affair, undertaken when she was maddened by heartbreak and rage and longing to get even—had grown into a reeking cesspit.

Like father like daughter, all of England believed. Even her lover, embarrassed by the crim con case and sickened by the stories, abandoned her.

Lord Quentin had urged her to entrust the letters to him. She remembered the exchange very well:

You must have heard the rumors, he said. Elphick has hopes of becoming our next prime minister.

Some would say that England will get the leader it deserves, she answered.

If the man’s a traitor, his lordship said, isn’t it long past time he paid the penalty?

Hanged, drawn, and quartered, do you mean? she said. But is that punishment enough? Why don’t you leave it to me?

She didn’t add, Why should I trust you?

For all she knew, Quentin was one of Elphick’s pawns. For all she knew, every word Lord Quentin uttered was part of an elaborate lie concocted by her former husband, a brilliant liar.

Quentin had returned several times, until at last she’d told the servants he was not to be admitted.

Some weeks later, her villa was searched. It was efficiently done. The signs were not obvious. But Magny had noticed, and

once he pointed out the signs, so had she.

He’d warned her that her bank accounts and the contents of the bank vaults would probably be scrutinized. Government agents could get in wherever they liked, and Elphick had built up a network of allies in government. Magny had offered plenty of advice. Too much. The matter had made him finical and meddlesome. Since she’d decided years ago that no man, ever again, would control her, they’d quarreled, repeatedly.

And so she’d left Mira.