Page 12 of A Duke in Disguise
She lobbed the crust of bread at his head and missed by a good six inches. “I was sixteen! And I certainly didn’t...” She gestured at the book. “I understand the desire to go to bed with men, my point is that they’re more trouble than they’re worth, by all accounts. Oh, I beg your pardon, Ash, I’m sure your lady friends are well taken care of. Much happier than this poor girl.” She frowned again at the drawing. And now she was imagining precisely what Ash might do to satisfy his bedmates, which was the last thing she ought to be thinking of. Worse still, she was enjoying it. “I do apologize. Forget I said—”
“Plum, if you think I object in the least to your perverse ruminations, you have badly misjudged me. Now,” he said, rising to his feet and brushing invisible dirt from his trousers, “I’m off to draw you some well-fucked women.” His ears were still pink but he seemed to have regained a degree of composure that still escaped Verity. He shot her a grin and left her alone in her study, slightly dazed, holding a hand to her heated cheek.
This would not do. They were working together and living in close quarters and she urgently needed to find a way to douse this spark before it turned into a conflagration. She had kept potential suitors and swains at a chilly distance, resolutely squashing any seed of desire she felt for any of them. Her time with Portia had been an exception, born of the misbegotten notion that an affair of the heart would be less complicated with a woman, especially a woman who had been her friend before becoming her lover. She had been wrong.
The world, Verity had always known, was filled with people who wanted things she had long since run out of: time, affection, assistance.
To take him—or anyone—as a lover was quite out of the question. There was only so much of her to go around, and she needed to keep some of that for herself or she’d disappear. That needed to be her guiding principle, her true north. She vowed to keep that in mind the next time her baser instincts threatened to get the better of her.
Chapter Four
The letter requested that Ash arrive at the peculiarly precise time of a quarter past eleven on any Tuesday or Thursday morning. Ash supposed rich people got used to ordering people about in unaccountable ways, so he didn’t think much of it. When he lifted the heavy brass knocker of the house in Cavendish Square, the door was promptly opened by a liveried footman.
“I’m Ash—John Ashby, here to see Lady Caroline Talbot,” Ash said, his voice echoing in the vast marble hall. “She’s expecting me.”
The footman murmured something and disappeared through a doorway, leaving Ash alone in a hall that could have fit the entire Holywell Street bookshop twice over and left room for a coach and four. The walls were the purest white, unblemished by any stains from soot or damp. A couple of paintings hung in gilt frames, and with a start Ash realized that one of them was quite possibly a van Dyck. Before he could make up his mind about it, his attention was drawn to the sweeping staircase that dominated one end of the hall, its banister arcing ostentatiously from the upper stories down to the pink-and-white checkerboard marble floor. It was extravagant, showy, and grossly out of proportion to the dimensions of the hall. But he couldn’t quite take his eyes away from it, and not only because of its poor taste. The longer he examined it, the odder he felt.
If he had experienced any of his usual symptoms—dizziness, vagueness, that godawful headache—he might have thought he was about to have one of his episodes. When he looked at the staircase, he had the strangest sensation that the walls ought to be pale green rather than white, and that there ought to be a watercolor of the seaside instead of the possible van Dyck. He shut his eyes and filled his lungs. Perhaps this was a new symptom. It had been so long since he had an episode that he had gotten out of the habit of expecting his brain and body to inconvenience him in new and elaborate ways. Now, faced with the prospect of having a seizure alone in a strange place, he wanted nothing more than to make a hasty exit back onto the street.
Brisk footsteps interrupted his thoughts, and he opened his eyes to see a woman walking towards him. She was tall and angular, with dark hair tucked into a lace cap. “Good day. You must be Mr. Ashby.” Her voice was hardly more than a whisper. “Follow me. Quickly, now.” She led him through a series of corridors at a pace he had difficulty matching. “I admired the frontispiece you did for that novel, so I wrote to the book’s publisher.”
“Which novel?” he asked.
“The one with the wicked signor.”
“A good many of them do have evil signors, ma’am,” he said wryly. Was it ma’am or my lady? Or was there some other manner of addressing a woman who had Lady before her given name? Verity wouldn’t know, Nate wouldn’t care, and Roger was months away by letter. He tried to push away the irrational sense of abandonment that crept up on him these days whenever he thought of Roger.
“That’s very true,” Lady Caroline said in a small, thin voice, “but this one had a very detailed and correct heliotrope in the foreground, and I thought if you could do that, you might be able to help me. Now, oh dear, we don’t have much time, so step this way, if you will.”
Ash didn’t know why they had these time constraints, or why the lady was scurrying like a mouse through her own home, or indeed why she was whispering. But before he could attempt to make sense of it, she opened a door and ushered Ash into a room that had to be ten degrees warmer than the rest of the house and was so packed with potted plants that he could hardly see the tiled floor.
“Oh,” he breathed.
“You need not concern yourself with any of these,” she said briskly, waving her hand about them. “All very common specimens.”
These plants, with their peculiar leaves and brightly colored flowers, might indeed be common specimens, but if so they were common specimens of something Ash had never before seen. They had the look of faraway lands, of jungles and bazaars and places he had no hopes of seeing with his own eyes. Even the scent that permeated the room was heavy and sweet, making him forget the gray London sky, heavy with rain clouds, that loomed beyond the tall glass windows of the conservatory. There had to be a couple of coal fires blazing about somewhere to maintain this decadent warmth, but Ash couldn’t see beyond the profusion of foliage.
“This, now, is what I require your assistance with.” She brushed aside a fern of some sort and gestured to a small table, upon which sat a stack of papers tied loosely with a blue ribbon. “This is my herbarium,” she said.
Sensing that some kind of enthusiastic response was expected, he murmured an “Ah,” hoping that she would explain what precisely an herbarium was, so he wouldn’t have to guess.
“You may touch it,” the lady said.
Ash felt that it would be rude to refuse, so he sat on the stool that was placed before the table and untied the ribbon. On each page was a pressed plant, sometimes including everything from root to flower. They had been pressed and dried to a thinness hardly greater than that of the paper itself. Each plant was labeled in the same elegant hand as the letter Verity had received.
He carefully turned over the pages until he came to a delicate star-shaped blue flower. The flower’s Latin name, which meant nothing to Ash, was written carefully. But beneath that was “Buenos Aires.” The next page said Japan. He turned the page again. Damascus. Prague.
“You have traveled far, ma’am,” he said, tasting the jealousy on his own tongue.
“Oh, dear me, no,” she said in that brittle whisper, “I seldom leave London. I’ve purchased these specimens. I find out what ports a ship is meant to call at and seek out a reliable-looking junior officer to employ in pressing specimens and keeping them dry. There’s quite a brisk trade in these items among collectors.”
He wanted to ask whether she sold her specimens or whether such commerce was beneath the attention of a lady, but instead he turned the page again and saw that the paper was singed at the edges. So was the next sheet, and the one after that.
“That is why I require your help,” she said. “There was an, ah, unfortunate accident, you see. The entire herbarium was nearly lost, so I thought I’d hire a skilled artist to make me a copy. Of course it won’t be as useful as the original nor will it be worth more than a few pennies to other collectors, but it will be something. I’ve spent two decades doing this and I can’t let it go to waste.”
He looked up from the book and regarded her carefully for the first time, examining her with an illustrator’s regard for detail. She was about forty, with dark hair visible beneath that fine lace cap. Her morning gown of sky blue muslin was of the first quality, and her India shawl had cost somebody a pretty penny. Her profile was what he supposed one might call patrician: straight nose, strong jaw, high cheekbones. But there were lines around her eyes, as if she were in the habit of squinting. She had the nervous twitchiness of a startled hare. And when he looked closely at her face, he had the same sensation of wrongness as when he regarded the staircase.
He shook his head and returned his attention to the herbarium. “Shall I take it with me, ma’am? I expect it would take me a fortnight.”
