Fortune's Son (23 page)

When Philip entered the dressing room, he was arrested by a remarkably impassioned display.

In the midst of her levee, Susannah, Lady Messingham, sat at a table littered with glass bottles in various shapes and sizes, tins of tinted powders, and a silver patch box. As her maid removed curling papers from her hair, a foppish young gentleman flung himself prostrate at her feet, waxing in rhapsodic verse:

“Your face for conquest was designed;

your every motion charms my mind;

Angels, when you, your silence break,

forget their hymns, to hear you speak;

However, when at once they hear and view,

are loath to mount and long to stay with you.

Love's my petition, All my ambition;

if e'er you discover more faithful a lover,

So real a flame, I'll die, I'll die—”

He clutched his breast with his final declamation.

“So give up my game.”

“Philip!” Lady Susannah exclaimed with pleasure, forgetting at once the existence of her lovelorn swain in catching his reflection in the glass. “I thought you in Newmarket for the sennight, and had not even hoped to see you for some days yet.”

“Obviously not,” he remarked, directing a scathing eye at the would-be poet scrambling guiltily to his feet.

Sukey chuckled and said, by way of introduction, “May I make known to you Mr. Samuel Derrick.”

“Derrick, you say? Then I must have my poets confused. I could have sworn the verse was Dryden,” Philip said.

The young man flushed to his ears and stammered, “My work has been much compared with the great John Dryden.”

“You've a remarkably similar style. One might say to a word.”

With red splotches flushing his powdered cheeks, the poet turned back to the object of his panegyric. “Perhaps I should be going now, my lady? I have yet to compose the promised ode to your eyes.”

“You needn't hasten on my account,” Philip said, handing the gentleman-poet his hat, cane, and gloves. Taking the not-so-subtle hint, Mr. Derrick made a sweeping bow to the lady, glared indignantly at his rival, and departed.

“Posturing, plagiarizing popinjay!” Philip mumbled before the door had even closed.

“You needn't have been so rude, my love,” she reprimanded with a twinkle of humor. “I fear you have quite driven him away, when he was avowed to immortalize my pulchritude in verse.”

“What, him? He's no more poet than I am. I'd call him nothing more than a rhapsodizing cicisbeo.”

“Don't be cruel, Philip. Jealousy ill becomes you.”

“You think me jealous? I'm not jealous. I just have a strong aversion to bad verse.”

“But every lady of fashion has one these days.”

“A poem or a cicisbeo?”

“Why, either or both,” she declared. “Besides, he's completely harmless.”

“I've been absent too long if you allow such a poor specimen to make violent love to you.”

“You fear usurpation?” she teased.

He caught and held her gaze and brushed the backs of his fingers down her arm. “I fear no such thing.”

The confident reply, as much as the accompanying touch, made her shiver in excited anticipation.

“My arrival is not a disagreeable surprise, I trust?” he asked.

“Only as I am positively unfit to receive you,” she replied as the maid hustled to remove the last of the curling papers from her hair.

Philip cast an appreciative gaze over her state of dishabille. Only one of her long, shapely legs wore a silk stocking; the other stocking, along with her beribboned garters, hung suggestively over the footstool. His gaze lingered at the low neckline of her lace chemise where her stays revealed milky white shoulders and the generous curve of softly rounded breasts.

“On the contrary, my delightfully disheveled lady, I think you very fit to
receive
me
.”

The maid blushed crimson, but the lady responded to his double entendre with a well-pleased, throaty chuckle. Heedless of the scandalized servant, Philip moved to brush his lips to his lover's cheek, but she turned her face and offered her mouth instead.

Philip eagerly accepted the invitation and released her reluctantly after their long lingering kiss.

Her mouth curved with meaning. “You see, I am truly bliss-filled to see you, but shan't flatter myself that you returned early just for want of my company.”

“Never doubt my desire to fill you with bliss, Sukey.”

He traced a lone finger slowly along her décolletage, causing her womb to clench at the sensation. “But unfortunately, I must forgo that exquisite experience until a later time. I need to speak with you.” He slanted a glance at the servant. “Privately.”

Few others would have sensed the note of disquiet in his indolent tone, but Sukey dismissed her protesting servant with an imperious wave.

“But madam! The rout and the playhouse!”

“I doubt I'll be attending either after all, Sarah. Prithee fetch my cap and dressing gown, and then you may go. I'll write my regrets to her ladyship anon.”

The servant returned promptly with the requested garments, sniffing with little disguised affront when Philip took them from her hands. A warning look from her mistress sent her out the door. The sharp click followed by a derisive snort announced the maid's withdrawal.

Sukey looked bemused when Philip held the robe to help her into it.

“I've removed your clothes often enough, I think I can manage creditably to dress you.” His boyish smirk didn't linger but his lips did, as they played intimately upon the skin of her shoulder before finally covering it with the silk dressing gown.

With a provocative look, she entwined her arms about his neck and would have kissed him had he not held her gently at a distance.

“What is it, Philip? You had a racing engagement of some consequence, did you not?” She frowned at the shadows shading his dark eyes and the deep grooves accentuating the grim line of his mouth.

“I did,” he said, affecting carelessness, but the tautness of his bearing put her in mind of a caged tiger.

“Then pray tell me what has you so bedeviled, my love?”

“It went very badly. Appallingly so.”

“I have never known you to wager indiscriminately. Surely it cannot be so dreadful,” she said.

His speaking look revealed the depth of his worry.

“Is it so? Then pray let us not talk of it now.”

She drew him to her and reached on her toes to press fleeting kisses to his jaw while she loosened his cravat. When he laid his hand over hers to arrest her progress, she ignored him and continued her loving ministrations. Between sultry kisses and caresses, she divested him of all but smallclothes and led him to the nearby Turkish divan that appointed her dressing chamber.

With no words passing between them, she knelt between his knees, according to her pleasure. When she moved to the buttons of his breeches, she pressed a finger to his lips, silencing his protest with a reproachful look.

“Not now,” she gently chided, checking his reticence with a gaze that set him aflame. “Indulge me, dearest. Anon will be time enough to talk.”

Giving himself up to her, and stroking her hair, Philip groaned in surrender. “God only knows how I need you, Sukey.”

***

Satisfied she had temporarily abated his cares, Sukey lay cradled in Philip's well-sated embrace.

“How much was it, my love?”

“Far more than I care to say,” he answered.

She was almost afraid to voice the words when she asked, “You don't mean to say you are ruined?”

His laugh was humorless. “Ruined? Beyond belief. Beyond any hope of recovery.”

“And Charlotte? Have you told her?”

“At the expense of my best brandy.”

“I don't understand.”

“'Tis inconsequential, my dearest.”

“No, Philip. I truly don't understand! Charlotte came to see me, you see. Just last evening, in fact, as I was dressing for the theatre. She was attired in a traveling robe, and never have I seen her so radiant. Positively ebullient, even. Given your news, it makes no sense. No sense at all.”

“Charlotte was here? And dressed to travel? Perhaps she seeks to flee the bailiff ahead of me. As my wife, she shares liability in the debts.”

“The letter!” Sukey gasped, nearly shooting from the divan. “I nigh forgot. She entrusted me with a letter for you.” She swiftly retrieved it from atop her escritoire.

“Perhaps she has absconded with the mysterious Roberts!” Philip laughed. “Such a finishing touch to my utter humiliation would surely explain her glee.”

“How ridiculous you sound. After seven years of marriage, she can't possibly abhor you to that degree.”

He regarded her dubiously as she handed him the letter.

“We both know the depth of her loathing, but why she should be so pleased about this is beyond my ken.” Philip murmured something indistinguishable as his hands fumbled with the wax seal and tore it open with an oath.

Philip stared dumbfounded at the foolscap. As he struggled to digest the contents, first confusion followed in rapid succession by astonishment, fury, and then something indefinable registered on his face.

“Devington? My God, it's true! She really has absconded with the devil.”

“Devington? Robert Devington? But he is dead,” she said.

“Not so dead after all, it seems. It was Devington all along.”

“My God!” she cried. “
That's
what she meant by it!”

“By what?”

“She made the most enigmatic remark about forgiving you when her love returned from the dead. I interpreted it as meaning ‘when pigs fly' but apparently she really meant it!”

“Then after all this time, when I least would have seen it coming, the pair conspired against me!” Overcome by the magnificence of it all, Philip threw back his head and let out a cachinnatory roar.

His financial devastation and complete ruin had come by the hands of his erstwhile friend, his wife's one-time love, whose life he had ruined eight years ago. It was true, unadulterated vengeance in all its glory.

“You can't mean it!” Sukey cried, snatching the letter from his hands while tears of ironical mirth streamed down his face.

Her brows drew together as she scanned the letter.

“But 'tis a farce worthy of the Drury Lane stage!” Philip wiped his eyes. “I ruined his life, thus he bides his time until he can ruin mine. We have surely come full circle now, have we not?”

“But, Philip, don't you understand?” she said. “This letter is your reprieve. You've been given time to meet your obligations.” She continued reading and her face clouded. “But wh… what is this about a son?”

Although resigned to sharing the man she loved with his wife, the thought of him with any other was almost more than she could bear.

“What of the boy?” Sukey repeated.

“
What
of
the boy?” Philip echoed.

“Will you seek him out?”

“Sukey, my dearest, dearest love.” He encircled her in his arms. “I know nothing of any bastard. There has been none other than you these past six years. Only you.”

“Then why would Charlotte imply such a thing?”

“Purely to further my torment?” he suggested. “Besides, what good would it do to pursue the issue? Don't you think in this instance it would be preferable to all parties to just let sleeping dogs lie?”

“But a son, Philip!”

“Correction—a bastard. Legally, there will ever be a distinction between the two.”

“How can you be so callous?”

“What, pray, would you have me do?”

“Find the boy and acknowledge him!”

“To what possible advantage, my love? There is none.”

“But we are speaking of your blood!”

Philip gritted his teeth in an effort to modulate his tone. “The boy,
if
he
even
exists
, has a home already. You would have me claim him to what possible end?”

Sukey turned to face him with misting eyes. “To ensure he is fed, clothed, kept safe from harm, and to educate him befitting his rightful station. In sum, to fulfill a father's obligation to his son.”

“For a bastard born of another woman, Sukey?” he asked softly, bracing his hands on her quivering shoulders. “You would have me put him daily before your eyes? How could I ever do that to you?”

Her inability to bear a child would always be a painful specter between them. When she and Philip had reunited after their lengthy estrangement, he had again proposed marriage, offering to put Charlotte quietly aside, but Sukey had once more refused the man she so desperately loved. Knowing she could never bear him an heir, she had relegated herself to the position of mistress rather than risk losing him again.

She closed her eyes in an attempt to tamp down the pain Philip's words inflicted, but he saw through her efforts and wrapped her in his arms. “If it means so much to you, dearest, I will make some inquiries.”

“Thank you,” she said with a weak smile. “You know, Philip, this changes everything.”

“Perhaps,” Philip said. “If it is all true, it does indeed change everything.”

He kissed her. One kiss led to two, and then to her bed, where he made slow, deliberate love to her and congratulated himself at having so deftly put the matter to rest.

***

Leaving Sukey's bed, Philip quickly dressed and went to the writing desk where he scratched on a sheet of foolscap. After signing and sanding the note, he rang for a footman to dispatch it.

“What are you doing?” she asked sleepily.

“I think it would be prudent to seek legal counsel.” He returned to the desk and unlocked a drawer, retrieving a silk purse from within. “Until I have all the answers, I must also control the immediate damage and buy some time to come about.”