Page 8 of Lord Appleby's Gorgeous Imposter
Meanwhile, Chiltern’s little wife lifted her chin, but she fluttered her fan. Her attitude denoted that she really could not care less about the specifics of money. “I simply do not understand exchange of coin. Though I do wonder how anyone makes a profit.”
“Confusing, I admit, Lady Chiltern,” Tate said blithely, “even to me.” Grateful for her interruption, he smiled. He wished no discussion of his expertise, and he was very happy that the orchestra offered up a round of ditties, a sign for the audience to quieten.
He wanted only to see Charmaine. The little cheat.
Just as everyone settled in for the curtain to rise, two more people entered the box. Lord Ramsey arrived with a lady on his arm. Ram, Kane, and Tate had been friends since they were children. With quick introductions by Kane, Tate learned Ram’s friend was Madame St. Antoine.
The name flitted through Tate’s memory. He’d read her dossier in Scarlett Hawthorne’s offices. Madame St. Antoine had been school friends with Scarlett, the young lady who ran their network from the offices of her merchant company in London. Madame St. Antoine was a fiery redhead of exquisite beauty whom no man worth his salt could ever ignore or forget. But Tate’s and Kane’s boyhood friend Ramsey appeared stiff, formal, as if he could not bear to notice that the ravishing widow on his arm was his most glorious asset this evening.
“I am delighted to meet you, madame,” Tate offered, raising her hand to his lips.
“Merci beaucoup, Monsieur le Comte.As am I to meet you,” she said as she settled in the chair beside Tate. “Are you here for an extended stay in Paris?”
“Oui, madame. I am to talk with a few financiers about the exchange of currency.”
“A difficult task, monsieur. Our first consul has not yet brought all the provincial currencies into line. And we have many who counterfeit with great abandon.”
Tate frowned. “I hear the government hunts for them diligently.”
“Indeed, sir. And quickly sentences them to death. By guillotine, no less.”
Tate winced. “Harsh. But it is right the government detains them. Destroys their presses. Nothing hurts commerce so badly as poor means to buy and sell goods.”
The lady arched her lovely red brows. “The primary reason the Bourbons no longer rule is the abuse of finances. Bonaparte must get it under control or he will follow theancien regimeto the grave.”
Tate agreed with her. But he was grateful they were in a theater box full of British. Even she was by blood an Englishwoman. Adopted informally by a lady she called her aunt, Amber St. Antoine, née Gaynor, had lived since age nine in Paris. She had married a Frenchman, a vintner from the Champagne, who had died a few years ago. But it was clear by madame’s rhetoric that she sympathized with republicans.
Tate suspected she did more than sympathize. That was why Scarlett had allowed him to read madame’s biography in the merchant company’s records room. St. Antoine worked against the hegemony Bonaparte commanded over France and much of Italy. Scarlett would not have given him such informationof St. Antoine’s activities unless it were vitally important he understand the lady’s sympathies.
The orchestra, small as it was, raised its decibel level. Tate set his jaw, anticipation mixing with satisfaction as he settled more into his chair.
The play would start soon. Tate folded his hands together, his attention on the floor, where most of the audience was composed of men. Dandies. Out for an evening to look over the newest actress to seduce.
Tate snorted. Charmaine was nojeune fille, not like Madame George, the girl of sixteen who had opened in Racine’sPhèdrethe night before last at a theater across town. Charmaine refused to compete with the more famous French girl who was turning heads with her talent—and had demanded she debut after the girl. Returning to her country, according to the Paris gossip sheets, she had insisted that she would honor the occasion by performing only comedy.
Charmaine was crafty, wishing to grab the city’s attentions soon after the other girl debuted. Charmaine was older, twenty-five or -six. But she looked younger. Always had. Short, small boned, with a glorious mane of platinum hair, and perfectly formed doe eyes, aquiline nose, and exquisitely arched cheeks, Charmaine looked timeless.
And always she used it to her advantage. She was polite and exuberantly charming. Well read, too. But she possessed another quality, which few living men or women could match. She was that rare commodity, descended from Henry Bourbon in some obscure way, and an émigré of the noble lineage whose father had been ruthlessly hunted, tried ingloriously, and quickly guillotined.
With a bit of Bourbon blood from the Orleans branch, Charmaine claimed to be a minor princess. Josephine Bonaparte, said the gossips, had heard of Charmaine’s fame inLondon and the lady’s plight. With compassion for the actress, Josephine had personally persuaded the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Talleyrand, to invite Charmaine back to her homeland. After all, the talented woman did not ask for her lands returned. What, asked the first consul’s wife, could be the harm in having her on stage here in her home?
Charmaine’s denial of interest in claiming the estate was a prudent decision. In fact, it was a concession to those who had bought up pieces of her father’s estate since his death. But all of that was moot: Bonaparte had decreed that none of the properties confiscated by any government entity since the fall of the monarchy would be returned to any aristocrat who claimed previous ownership. Certainly no woman could make a claim.
As for how Charmaine’s reputation appealed to Parisians, it was rumored that she said she had long ago forgiven the terrorists who had run her and her family from her home. That she had not said she forgave those who’d abducted and killed her younger sister Diane, however, was a mark against her. Few remained alive or in power from the era of Robespierre, but it was not wise to speak against anything that had occurred then. Here in the country of her birth, Charmaine proclaimed she was now simply a humble actress who had earned her living in the theaters of Drury Lane for the past six years. She would be delighted to claim Paris now, too.
Tate shifted in his chair. The men below jostled about, laughing, joking, eager to view the French lady and raise her reputation…or lower it. Gossip sheets this past week proclaimed that the ethereal Charmaine de Massé (not that English bastardization of her family name, Massey) was a paragon. Even the stories of how her hired coach had been attacked by two highwaymen just outside Rouen on the journey here did nothing more than endear her to her countrymen. Word was that she hadclimbed from the carriage and faced the point of two pistols by the cutthroats, then offered up her money.
Tate scoffed. He bet she’d slipped her pistol from her reticule and threatened any idiot to come closer and steal her money. Too bad for them too if they tried to take her little dose of laudanum. The lady killed to get it—and would, Tate had always believed, to keep it.
If that story of her glorious heroism was not enough, he knew she most likely encouraged the stories of her youth to be broadcast by every rag in town. He had watched her share it often.
She loved to tell it with sighs and wringing hands, and it always contained the same bleeding-heart prose. For many years of her youth, she had endured poverty and exile with her family. The story served to burnish Charmaine’s triumphal return to her native land. She’d been a young girl who fled Paris in a rickety carriage, sitting on a valise in which she’d stuffed the family’s diminished fortune. Then, hiding beneath her cloak her two little sisters and her mother from the mobs, she had encouraged them all as they endured three weeks’ sojourn through hail and rain and flood to the coast of Brittany. There they departed on an English smuggler’s sloop for the rocky coast of Southern England. In that country where most could not bear the look or sound of a French man or woman, Charmaine had helped her family rise above the suffering and shame of their impoverished immigration to a land where no one loved them.
Tate swallowed bile at the tale.
Too bad it’s all lies.
He grumbled to himself about lies people told themselves…and embellished for others. No wonder Charmaine became an actress. She lied with practiced ease.
