Darling Beast (Maiden Lane) (7 page)

Edwin had a long, thin face, dominated by black arching brows that stood out like signposts of his temperament in his fair complexion. His smile was a V of merriment with more than a dash of mischievousness, completely impossible to ignore. His black eyes could dance with joyous spirits or glower with ill intent—and they were quick to change. Lily had more than once heard Maude
muttering under her breath that Edwin was the Devil’s bastard—as much fey as mortal. Lily had to admit that if she believed in such nonsense she’d think Edwin a magical creature herself.

He had, after all, saved her on more than one occasion from her mother’s drunken neglect when she was a girl.

“Would you like some tea?” Lily asked.

“Have you anything stronger?” Edwin threw himself on the settee beside Daffodil and Indio.

The settee wobbled ominously and Lily sent it a worried glance. “We have wine,” she said reluctantly. Edwin’s jaw was unshaven, his bristles in dark contrast to his snowy wig.

“Then pour me a glass, there’s a lass.” He smiled at her winsomely.

She went to where the bottle stood on the mantel, ignoring Maude’s tutting.

“Thank you,” Edwin said when he took the glass from her fingers. He swallowed a sip and winced. “Good Lord, that tastes like—”

Lily widened her eyes and looked pointedly at Indio.

“A mud puddle,” Edwin finished smoothly.

“Ick,” Indio said with interest. “Can I taste it?”

Edwin tapped him on the nose. “Not for another year at the very least.”

Lily cleared her throat.

Edwin rounded his eyes at Indio. “Maybe even
two
.”

“Bollocks,” her son said, making Lily choke in shock.

“Indio!”

But Edwin was laughing so hard he was spilling his wine, much to the delight of Daffodil, who was lapping it up off the settee.

“Here now.” Thankfully Maude intervened. “Best come outside, Indio, you and Daffodil.”

“Aw!”

“I seem to remember…” Edwin looked theatrically about the room. “Ah!” He picked up the parcel he’d earlier left by the settee. “This might be for you, young nephew.”

Indio eagerly took the parcel and unwrapped it, revealing a toy wooden boat, cloth sails and all.

Indio looked up, his mismatched eyes shining. “Thank you, Uncle Edwin!”

Her brother waved a hand magnanimously. “Think nothing of it, scamp. No doubt you’ll want to try it out in that pond I saw.”

“But only with Maude nearby,” Lily said hastily.

“Or Caliban?” Indio asked.

Lily hesitated for a moment, but the big man had been exceptionally gentle with her son last night. “Or Caliban,” she agreed.

“Huzzah!” Indio rushed from the theater, chased by a barking Daffodil.

Maude gave her a look that promised a talk later on and then followed her charge.

Lily sighed, taking a seat on one of the wooden chairs from the table. “You shouldn’t have spent so much on him.”

Her brother shrugged carelessly. “It was hardly a king’s ransom.”

And yet the money could’ve been better spent on clothes or food.
Lily pushed the thought aside. Edwin had never been frugal with his money and a boy needed a treat once in a while as much as clothes and food.

He grinned at her as if he could tell the path of her thoughts. “Who is Caliban? An imaginary friend?”

“No, he’s quite real.”

“And Caliban is truly his name?” Her brother’s eyebrows were high arches of curiosity.

“Well, no—not that we know of, anyway. He’s a gardener here. Indio has taken to following him about.”

But Caliban was much more than that, Lily realized as she pleated her skirt between her fingertips. She remembered those huge hands, deftly holding his pencil as he impatiently wrote. Those beautifully airy sketches in his notebook. It was laughable, really, that she’d at first taken him for an idiot. It was only the day after his confession and she couldn’t think of him as anything but intelligent.
Wonderfully
intelligent.

And for some reason she didn’t want to discuss the big, gentle gardener with her sometimes devious brother. She glanced up at him. “Will you sup with us?”

His own look was swift and calculating, but he took her abrupt change of subject meekly enough.

“I’m sorry, no.” Edwin got up to pour himself more wine. “I have an appointment I must keep this evening.” He took another swallow of the wine and then turned one of his most charming smiles on her. “I came to see how the play is going.”

“Terribly.” She groaned and slumped in her chair. “I can’t think how I ever wrote dialogue before—it’s so wooden, Edwin! Perhaps I should burn it and start over.”

Usually this was the point at which her brother teased her out of her doubts, but he was oddly silent.

She straightened, looking at him.

He was grimacing into his wineglass. “As to that…”

“What is it?”

He shrugged. “It’s nothing really, but I promised to have the play done by next week. I have a buyer who wants to use it for a house party theatrical.”

“What?” She gasped, feeling her chest tighten. For a moment she wondered if the house party the play was intended for was the same one she herself was to act at, but then sheer panic swamped the thought. However was she to finish in a
week
?

Edwin grimaced, his mobile mouth stretching into a comical shape. “It’s just that I’ve had a bit of bad luck at cards lately. I need my portion of the play proceeds and this is a quick sale. Apparently the buyer had originally engaged Mimsford to write the play, but the old sod has fled London and his creditors.”

They’d made a bargain years ago, when Lily had started writing plays: Edwin would take the plays and sell the works under his name. He was both a man and a much better salesman than she. He knew how to float on the fringes of aristocratic society—something Lily had never wanted to do—and thus had myriad associates. Their arrangement had worked very well in the past. She and Edwin had made a tidy sum together. But now she was at the end of her resources and had begun to wonder if she should try selling her plays herself. Of course that wasn’t very fair to Edwin…

She shook her head, trying to think. “Whom do you owe, Edwin?”

“Don’t take that tone with me.” He stood suddenly and tossed back the rest of the wine in the glass. “It’s insulting.” He glanced slyly at her. “
And
it reminds me of our dear mother.”

That
sent a guilty chill down her spine. “But—”

He darted over and knelt in front of her chair, taking her hands. “Darling, it’s nothing to worry about, truly. Just finish the play, hmm? Quick as you can.” He squeezed her hands and bussed her cheek. “You know you’re the best.
Far
better than that hack Mimsford, and he’s had two smash hits in a row at the Royal.”

“But Edwin,” she said helplessly, “what if I can’t write that fast?”

She saw his eyes darken before he dropped his gaze. “Then I’ll have to find some other means of ready blunt. Perhaps Indio’s father—”

“
No.
” It was her turn to squeeze his hands. Her heart had begun to beat in terror against her rib cage. “Promise me you’ll not approach him, Edwin.”

“You must allow he’s very rich—”

“Promise.”

“Very well.” He made a discontented moue. “But I need to pay my creditors somehow.”

“I’ll finish the play,” she said, dropping his hands.

He looked up at her through his eyelashes. They really were quite long, she thought absently. They almost gave him an innocent demeanor.

Almost.

“By next week.” His voice was light, but no less hard for it.

“By next week,” she agreed.

“Splendid!” He kissed her again, on both cheeks, and rose to dance across the room, his good humor restored. “Thank you, darling. That’s a load off my mind. Now I really must dash. I’ll be back next week to pick up the manuscript, shall I?”

And he was out the door before she could say anything.

Lily stared stupidly at the door. However was she to finish her play in a week?

“W
HY
,”
ASKED
A
RTEMIS
Batten, the Duchess of Wakefield, “are we hiding in a ruined musician’s gallery?”

Apollo grinned fondly at his twin sister. A duchess only five months and she swanned about as if born to the role. She wore some type of dark-green costume with wide lace ruffles at the sleeves that even he could tell was outrageously expensive. Her brown hair was bound up neatly at her nape and her dark-gray eyes were calm and happy—a wonderful improvement over the four years when she used to visit him in Bedlam.

Then her eyes had been filled with sick despair.

He took out his notebook and wrote,
Don’t want you to be seen by the other gardeners and Indio.

She frowned over his words as he dug into the wicker basket she’d brought with her: a new shirt—thank God—some socks and a hat and a smaller, cloth-wrapped parcel filled with lovely food.

After Bedlam, he’d never take any sort of food for granted again.

“Who’s Indio?” Artemis asked, quite reasonably, as he bit into an apple.

He held the apple between his teeth—ignoring his sister’s wrinkled nose—as he wrote:
Small, very inquisitive boy with a dog, a nursemaid, and a curious mother.

Her eyebrows shot up as he crunched the apple. “They live here?”

He nodded.

“In the
garden
?” She glanced around at the charred,
crumbling walls of the musician’s gallery. In front of the gallery was a row of marble pillars, which had once supported a roof over a covered walkway. The roof had caved in during the fire, leaving only the crumbling pillars. Apollo had plans for those pillars. With a little scouring, and a judicial blow from a mallet here and there, they would become very picturesque ruins. Right now, though, they were just gloomy, blackened fingers against the sky.

He’d commandeered one of the rooms behind the gallery, where once the musicians, dancers, and pantomime players had prepared for their performances. Here he’d propped a big, oiled tarp over one corner to keep out the rain and wind, and brought in a straw mattress and two chairs. Spartan accommodations, certainly, but there were no fleas or bedbugs, which made this heaven compared to Bedlam.

Apollo took back his notebook and scrawled:
They live in the theater. She’s an actress—Robin Goodfellow. Harte has given her his permission to stay here for the nonce.

“You know Robin Goodfellow?” For a second Artemis’s ducal dignity fled her and she looked as awed as a small lass given a halfpenny sweet.

Apollo decided he needed to find out more about Miss Stump’s acting career. He nodded warily.

Artemis had already recovered her aplomb. “As I remember, Robin Goodfellow is quite young—not more than thirty years, certainly.”

He shrugged carelessly, but alas, his sister had known him for a very,
very
long time.

Artemis leaned forward, her interest definitely engaged.
“She must be witty, too, to play all those lovely breeches roles—”

Breeches roles?
Those tended to be risqué. Apollo frowned, but his sister was nattering on.

“I saw her in something last spring, here at Harte’s Folly with Cousin Penelope. What was it?” She knit her brow, thinking, then shook her head. “I suppose it doesn’t matter. Have you talked to her?”

Apollo glanced pointedly at his notebook.

“You know what I mean.”

He skirted the truth:
My circumstances don’t lend themselves to polite social calls.

Artemis’s mouth crimped. “Don’t be silly. You can’t continue to hide forever—”

He widened his eyes incredulously at her.

“Well, you
can’t
,” she insisted. “You must find a way to live your life, Apollo. If that means leaving London, leaving
England
, then so be it. This”—she gestured to the tarp and chairs and straw mattress—“this isn’t living. Not truly.”

He grabbed the notebook and scribbled furiously.
What would you have me do? I need the money I invested in the garden.

“Borrow from Wakefield.”

He scoffed, turning his head aside. The last thing he wanted was to be in debt to his brother-in-law.

Artemis raised her voice stubbornly. “He’ll gladly lend you the money you need. Leave. Travel to the continent or the Colonies. The King’s men won’t pursue you so far, not if you take another name.”

He looked back at her and wrote angrily,
You would have me abandon the name I have?

“If needs be, yes.” She was so brave, his sister, so determined. “I hadn’t wanted to mention this before, but I think I might’ve been followed.”

He looked at her in alarm.
Followed here today?

“No.” She shook her head. “But on other days I’ve come to visit you. Once or twice I thought a man was following me.” She grimaced. “Never the same man, mind, so it may be I’ve entirely made the thing up.”

He frowned at her.

“Don’t give me that look,” she said. “I wasn’t sure—I’m still not sure—but don’t you see? If I
was
followed, if someone were to discover your hiding place… Apollo, you simply can’t stay here. You must leave the garden. Leave England. For your own safety.”

He blinked and stared down at his notebook, the paper smudged from his hand. He wrote carefully,
I cannot. I didn’t do it, Artemis.

“I know,” she whispered. “
I know.
But you don’t have any way of proving it, do you?”

He was silent—which was answer enough, he supposed.

She placed a hand on his arm. “This stubborn refusal to leave England will be the death of you or worse.” She leaned forward. “Please. You’re kind and smart and… and
wonderful
. You didn’t deserve Bedlam and you don’t deserve this awful half life. Please don’t let—”

He turned his shoulder to her, but that had never stopped his sister when she was on a tear.

“Apollo. Please don’t let obsession or… or revenge consume you. A name is important, I know, but it’s not nearly as important as
you
. Don’t let me lose my brother.”