The little white building glowed like a candle flame among all the low dark ones crouching around it.
“Oh, thank God,” she breathed.
Those were the first words either of them had uttered for one hundred feet. She had a feeling they were both invested in a certain anonymity, for reasons of their own.
The lamp hadn’t yet been taken in from its hook. It was miraculously still burning, even as the flame juddered. Her escort leaned his head back in an attempt to read the sign, which was impossible, as it was dancing and twisting on its chains in the winds.
Daphne rapped on the door.
She jumped backward when something hit the door with a soft thud from the opposite side.
There was a sound of a scuffle and a male expostulating.
The peep hatch flew open.
A large, pale eye appeared, blinked, then inspected them.
“Good evening.” The owner of the eye sounded a little winded, if cheerful. “Welcome to The Grand Palace on the Thames. What can we do for you?”
Daphne found the young woman’s voice—the cadences of a good servant in a fine household—very reassuring.
“Good evening,” Daphne said in her best Lady of the Manor voice. “We’re hoping you’ve rooms to let. I saw your advertisement and it seemed very clear that this is a fine establishment, indeed.”
“Oh, how lovely!” The young woman sounded genuinely delighted. “You’ll want to have a chat with our proprietresses, Mrs. Hardy and Mrs. Durand. As we’re very exclusive, you see.”
There ensued the scrape of a bolt being shot, and the door swung open upon paradise: a black-and-white marble foyer shining beneath a chandelier dripping with crystals. Blessed warmth rushed out and embraced them as though they were prodigal family.
They were ushered in by a young woman wearing a white cap which had tipped sideways on her blond head, as if she’d just collided with something.
Behind her stood a tall young man wearing understated blue livery and a harried expression. Both of them sported flushed cheeks.
“My name is Dot.”
“I’m Mr. Pike.”
They spoke at precisely the same time, which seemed to fluster them into silence. Their mouths then set in twin, stubborn lines.
Mr. Pike inhaled audibly and at length, seemingly mustering patience. He offered a smile. “Would you like me to take your wet wraps so you can warm yourselves next to the fire while you wait for Mrs. Durand and Mrs. Hardy?”
The foyer was flanked by what appeared to be two rooms; he gestured to the one on his left.
Daphne and her rescuer surrendered their hats and dripping wraps to the footman—her cloak, his dark, many-caped greatcoat, his beaver hat, her bonnet—and the maid named Dot watched him bear them away. Her expression confusingly suggested Mr. Pike had just robbed her.
“Have you indeed rooms to let, miss?” her escort prompted.
She turned with a start to them. And then she went still and studied them with what appeared to be unabashed fascination.
“We’ve a suite available. It’s very nice and a bit . . .” She lowered her voice as if she were confiding a delicious secret. “. . . dear.”
Daphne’s stomach clutched. A suite. Singular, she’d said. Perhaps only one room.
“A suite includes more than one room?” her companion cleverly asked.
“Three, sir.” She glowed as she imparted this marvel. “A sitting room, and two rooms for sleeping.”
This was marginally better.
“And the doors properly close and lock?”
“All of our doors and windows properly close and lock,” Dot informed him proudly. “And all of our hinges are well oiled, and our flues are clean.” Dot seemed to have interpreted this question as a matter of housekeeping. “I’ll go and tell Mrs. Hardy and Mrs. Durand that you’re here.”
She whirled and thundered up the stairs.
By the time Lorcan and Daphne arrived at their door, a bitter, relentless January wind had been soughing and moaning through previously unsuspected cracks and crevasses of The Grand Palace on the Thames for nigh on a fortnight. It seemed no room was exempt.
“It sounds like a Peruvian whistle,” Mrs. Pariseau had said one night in the sitting room, with startling specificity. She was one of their very first guests, a spirited widow who seemed possessed of a great store of arcane knowledge, so everyone assumed this was correct.
“Sounds a bit like my digestion,” Mr. Delacorte reflected in the smoking room. Anyone who had spent time with Mr. Delacorte there could attest that this was also correct.
“It sounds a bit like you when I make love to you,” Captain Hardy murmured into Delilah’s neck while they were in bed one morning, listening to a low moaning created by the wind, and she’d given him a playful little swat.
“It’s like the incessant chatter of a guilty conscience,” Lucien, Lord Bolt, marveled on a hush to his wife, Angelique, as they lay awake one night, listening to it.
“Well, when you think about some of the things this building has seen . . .” Angelique murmured.
In the scullery, the wind had once groaned so sorrowfully and so harrowingly Dot had taken such a fright that she now refused to enter it alone, or at night. The very notion of ghosts both terrified and thrilled her, but she also found it thrilling to be terrified. She liked to imagine she was a heroine in a Horrid novel.
All in all, the creaks, cracks, sighs, and whistles made Delilah and Angelique feel as if The Grand Palace on the Thames suddenly milled with unseen guests. Which was unsettling, as the ones they could see were challenge enough.
Delilah and Angelique had lately been forced to admit to themselves that they had made a series of rare miscalculations. Flush from their success of letting a room to a scandalous opera singer in exchange for a spectacularly profitable night of entertainment, they had taken a chance on a charming, blushing, coltish trio of young German musicians who agreed to play in the sitting room at night now and again in exchange for a reduced rate on their rooms. They were polite, they spoke little English, and they played like angels.
But they ate like oxen. With terrifying, unanticipated speed and gusto. Mr. Delacorte’s waistcoat button had popped twice as a result of efforts to keep up. Even Helga, who hailed from Germany and was inclined to be indulgent with anyone who appreciated her cooking, had been alarmed. She’d been compelled to frantically replan menus and shopping lists and budgets.
When they weren’t practicing Mozart exquisitely in the annex ballroom, Hans, Otto, and Friedreich laughed uproariously amongst themselves in the sitting room and flirted with the maids. All Delilah and Angelique had to do if they wanted to discover why Rose or Meggie hadn’t yet finished the dusting was to follow the sound of giggling.
And then there was Mr. Angus McDonald, a somber, flame-headed Scottish scholar they’d admitted because they found his brogue a thing of great beauty, a sound like rough water tumbling over rocks on the misty moors. Which meant, unfortunately, they often could scarcely understand him. During his interview, they had mistaken what proved to be a certain unyielding dourness for appealing gravity. And he said things like “He’s an awfy scunnersome laddie” and “Whit dae ye pit in clapshot?” which they suspected might be faintly insulting, but they could mostly only nod and smile, as not even Captain Hardy nor Mrs. Pariseau was fluent in Scots Gaelic. They felt rather terrible about it, but he was meant to stay only a fortnight, and he had been given the room over Delacorte. The encroaching storm likely meant Mr. McDonald was going nowhere soon, unless it was mad, driven there by Mr. Delacorte’s snoring.
And if Mr. McDonald and the German boys occupied opposite poles, in between were their husbands, who were at the moment moodily smoking in the gentlemen’s smoking room and talking in low voices of worrisome things they clearly didn’t want Delilah and Angelique to hear. Captain Hardy, a legendary former blockade commander, and Lucien, the bastard son of a duke who had made a fortune at sea, were now partners (along with Mr. Delacorte) in an import endeavor, the Triton Group. Their ship carrying silks and spices from the Orient was nearly a fortnight overdue in port. This was the source of their muttering. Any number of things could have happened to The Zephyr. Taken by pirates or sunk by a storm. A lightning strike might have turned the mizzenmast into a torch. Mutiny. Illness. Tsunamis. Sea monsters.
For more than a week Captain Hardy and Lucien had been away from home for long hours in meetings with investors and merchants and insurers, as well as helping to sandbag storage warehouses in preparation for the anticipated storm.
“It’s going to be a bad one,” they’d grimly predicted.
The ladies had prepared as best they could. Menus were planned that wouldn’t involve frequent trips to market; a little library of books and games, like Spillikins and decks of cards, were collected and installed in rooms, and embroidery silks and yarn and oil pastels were stockpiled in case a guest wished to pass the time knitting or drawing.
Such had been the steadily gathering tension at The Grand Palace on the Thames, Captain Hardy had taken to mostly speaking in tense monosyllables even to his wife, as if to offset the relentless vigor of the German boys. And he was never loquacious at best. Delilah could scarcely bear it.
So Angelique and Delilah went after the drafts the way Gordon, their fat, striped cat, went after mice, because moisture was the cancer of an old building like The Grand Palace on the Thames, and it was one of the few things they currently could control. Mr. Pike, their prized new footman, had been so helpful in that regard. But he, too, needed to be fed, and male servants were taxed.
When the first raindrops finally began to fall it was almost a relief, and Angelique and Delilah looked up alertly at the familiar and portentous sound of Dot scrambling up the stairs and set aside their mending as she burst breathlessly into the room.
“We’ve visitors who would like to let a suite.”
“A suite!” said Delilah. “Well then. What are they like, Dot?”
“She is a lady. And he is a pirate.”
She gazed at them with a look of happy expectation.
Delilah and Angelique exchanged glances.
“Dot,” Angelique began carefully. “Are you certain you aren’t confusing the two of them with the story Mrs. Pariseau read in the sitting room the other night?”
“She is a lady.” Dot, the former worst lady’s maid in the world and current cherished-if-occasionally-bewildering member of the staff, was a trifle indignant. She did know her ladies from her not-ladies. “She talks just like you and Mrs. Durand, elegant, like.” She liltingly imitated them. “Her cloak is good wool, but not in the first stare of fashion. Her shoes are well made but the toes are worn and she has all of her teeth and a nice smile. But she’s very pale and her eyes are like this.” She bracketed her own with her fingers and stretched her lids to illustrate someone who looked as though they’d had a tremendous surprise. “And he is a pirate,” she concluded firmly.
Delilah heard Angelique draw in a long, audible breath. As if she hoped if she sucked in enough air she’d find some nourishing patience somewhere in it, the way a whale took in krill.
Dot fanned out a hand and with the other counted out qualities on her fingers. “He is wearing a gold earring. And I think there’s a ruby in it! An earring! I ask you! His hair is this long”—she pointed to a place below her ear—“and it’s black as a raven’s wing! His teeth are bright. He is enormous.” Enormous was a word she’d lately taken to using as often as possible. “Black as a raven’s wing” she’d absorbed from one of the Horrid novels they’d read aloud in the sitting room at night. “And . . .” She paused, to heighten the sense of drama. “He has a scar from here”—she slowly drew it with her fingertip along her own face—“to here.”
They had to admit, their potential new guest sounded somewhat piratical. It wasn’t out of the realm of the possible, given that their pristine little boardinghouse was located near the docks. Even pirates had to disembark their ships sometimes.
She paused. “He seems pleasant, however,” she added, dubiously. “Pirates aren’t usually, are they?”
Angelique furrowed her brow. “Hmm. Did you inspect him for parrots, Dot, or wooden limbs?”
“No,” Dot admitted, dejectedly.
“And they’re a married couple?” Delilah was already untying her apron and smoothing her skirts in preparation for going downstairs.
“Well . . . she’s a lady alone with a man late at night and she said ‘we are looking for rooms.’ And I told them we had a suite of rooms available and it was dear, and they said ‘that will do.’”
Dot was hardly entirely naive. But neither Angelique nor Delilah wanted to enlighten her as to the variety of interesting reasons a Lady with a capital “L” might be compelled to take a room with a pirate for just the night. Most of those reasons did not quite align with their vision for The Grand Palace on the Thames. Every now and then a man brandishing a crumpled, yellowing menu of prurient services would appear at the door and request the Vicar’s Wheelbarrow. He would be sent packing with an admonishment to read the sign. Granted, the building’s past did still haunt the sign in the form of a single word: “rogues,” still faintly visible behind the elegantly lettered “The Grand Palace on the Thames.”
“Well, we’ll just go and have a chat with them, shall we? Will you bring in tea?” Angelique hung her apron on the hook near the door.
Usually this request prompted Dot to hop delightedly and bolt back down the stairs.
She remained rooted in place.
Angelique’s and Delilah’s eyebrows launched in tandem.
“Before we go down . . .” Dot took a deep breath. “I’ve something unfortunate to tell you.”
Delilah and Angelique said not a word to each other. Nor did they meet each other’s eyes.
The silent words “Oh, God” throbbed in the air.
“Very well,” Angelique finally ventured.
“It gives me no pleasure to report it,” Dot warned somberly.
“You can tell us anything, Dot,” Delilah said gently as Angelique’s eyes flared a caution at Delilah. In truth, neither of them was certain they could withstand hearing all of Dot’s thoughts. It would be like taking all the medicines in Mr. Delacorte’s case. Hallucinatory. Headache-inducing. One might never be the same after.
Dot took another deep sustaining breath and exhaled.
“Mr. Pike cursed near the front door.”
Angelique and Delilah carefully refrained from meeting each other’s eyes.
“I see,” Angelique said gravely.
“It was the word that begins with a ‘b’ and ends with an ‘ucks,’” Dot expounded.
So . . . bollocks.
“Right beneath our chandelier,” she pressed on, when they said nothing. She made it sound as though he’d urinated upon the holy sepulcher. The chandelier was, in fact, practically sacred as far as Dot was concerned. Below it, the words “The Grand Palace on the Thames” had first been uttered. Dot had been included in that magical moment and she never forgot it.
With great patience, Delilah suggested, “Did you perhaps step on Pike’s foot again, Dot?”
Dot hesitated. “His foot was the only part of him that arrived at the door before I did. I didn’t see it there when I arrived.”
She gazed innocently at them, which was no challenge for her as she’d come into the world equipped with eyes like dinner plates. She was blossoming in interesting ways since they’d all moved into The Grand Palace on the Thames. While they rather liked her emerging initiative and competitive streak, it was becoming clear they might need to guide and prune it the way one might coax roses over a trellis, before it ran amuck and sprouted into full-blown guile.
“He almost stepped on mine just the other day,” she defended, correctly interpreting their expressions again. “And he’s a good deal . . . taller.” The word “taller” drifted a little wistfully when she said it.
Pike was indeed tall. And fit. And probably anybody’s definition of handsome.
If only he wasn’t her nemesis, was the implication.
After the long and fruitless and frustrating search for a footman, Mr. Pike had been their reward at the end of a thrilling, harrowing episode at The Grand Palace on the Thames involving an earl’s runaway fiancée and a spymaster. And all the maids had been beside themselves with glee. Until Dot realized he would be competition.
“Dot, even fine, upstanding men might curse if trod upon in just the wrong place,” Delilah informed her.
“Oh, I didn’t know that.” Dot absorbed this information for a moment. “What is just the wrong place?”
“No. We’re not going to give you advice on how to torment Mr. Pike,” Angelique said firmly. “You are the senior employee, he is new, and as such we should like you to arrive at a compromise with Mr. Pike whereby the door is answered promptly and politely and no one comes away from it limping.”
“Am I in charge of Mr. Pike?” she breathed. Her face had gone radiant with possibility.
“No. But you are by way of a mentor. Someone who is kind enough to share their experience with a new person on staff.” Angelique, the former governess, was always a little stricter than Delilah, who never objected, as the two of their methods combined had proven to be effective.
“I see,” Dot replied, only a little deflated.
“Perhaps he’s still sore from the last time you trod upon him,” Delilah added. “You might even curse under such circumstances.”
“I would never,” Dot vowed, after the fashion of a martyr.
“Good to know, Dot,” Delilah humored. “Thank you for telling us about Mr. Pike. Will you go and make tea for our potential new guests now, please?”
Dot bolted down the stairs again.
And when Dot vanished up the stairs, Daphne and his Lordship at last turned to look at each other in the light of the chandelier.
Whenever a surge of emotion tempted Daphne to avert her eyes from something, some stubborn, pilgrim quality of character compelled her to confront it with a steady gaze instead. She wanted to be brave. Permanently brave. She thought perhaps the more she worked at it, the braver she would become. It seemed the best way to ensure she was never frightened or hurt again.
“When you look at me like that, I feel like you can see into every crevice of my mind,” Henry had once told her with a little laugh.
She’d been warmed clear through. She’d thought he’d found it charming.
So even as she felt her every muscle contract against this man’s sheer sensory impact, she didn’t look away from him.
And he was fearsome.
His face had the stark drama of a landscape shaped by elemental forces, battering seas and brutal winds and the like. Shadows lurked in the little valleys beneath cheekbones hard and high as fortress walls. Black whiskers glinted on his box-cornered jaw. Thick, dark brows hung over deep-set eyes. A majestic nose presided over all of this.
And a bright, white scar snaked like lightning from the corner of his eye to nearly his chin.
Perhaps that’s how he’d gotten so adept at knocking knives from hands. Someone in his history hadn’t missed. He’d probably decided that was never going to happen again.
His mouth—long and surprisingly beautifully shaped, the lower lip unequivocally sensual—curved in a patient, sardonic smile.
He likely knew what she was thinking and gave not one damn. There probably wasn’t a thing or a person a man like this would need to worry about.
What an enviable condition.
His expression gave no clue as to what he thought of her.
She suddenly felt small and ridiculous and plain next to him. As if the two of them were costumed for a pantomime. But who was she anymore, after all? She’d slipped and lodged in that awkward gap between social strata. Tumbling down further was unthinkable; her efforts to extricate herself merely seemed to wedge her in more tightly.
He turned away from her and inspected the room into which they’d been ushered.
It was soft and pink as a maiden’s blush in the firelight and so achingly cozy a lump formed in her throat.
The crystal chandelier had fallen in love with him: it picked out a blue gleam in his hair, the glint from the gold hoop in his ear, and sprinkled a few rainbows on his black coat. His hair fell to his collar and was tucked behind his ears.
“It looks like a granny’s house,” he murmured, bemused. “This place was once called The Palace of Rogues. It used to be a bordello.”
She recoiled. “You thought you were escorting me to a bordell—”
They pivoted at the soft swish of wool skirts and the brisk click of heels on marble. A blond woman and a brunette, side by side, wearing welcoming smiles.
No.
It couldn’t be.
Shock fleetingly warped the room before her eyes. Then it merged with disbelief and shame and embarrassment before they all settled in an icy-hot pool over her heart.
Of all the things Daphne dared to waste a moment wishing for over the years—that Henry would have been an only child, for instance, so that his brother would never had needed a governess, that her father had never learned how to play five-card loo—this wish was perhaps the most fervent of them all: that a trap door would open beneath her. Because her pride was an open wound. She sincerely felt she hadn’t the strength.
And yet, like all the moments that had preceded this one, she would need to face it anyway.
“Good evening. Welcome to The Grand Palace on the—”
The dark-haired woman stopped abruptly and her hand flew to her mouth in shock.
She slowly lowered it.
“Oh, my goodness,” she breathed. “Lady Worth? Daphne?”
