The Bad Baron's Daughter (9 page)

“Signal the driver to take us back to my house,” said Linden amicably. “You don’t want to go to Laurel, I don’t want you to go back to Zack, and you are so all fired hot to lose your virtue that…”

“But I didn’t really mean it!” cried Katie. “I’m sorry I was pettish, and I will go to Laurel, if that’s what you want. But… Lord Linden, isn’t she your mistress?”

“Lord no. Was that what was bothering you?” asked Linden, scrutinizing Katie’s face closely. “We’re… um, well, friends sometimes, when she’s got some damned bill that she wants me to pay. But mostly we fight like demons in a dog hole. I make a point of offending Laurel on a biweekly basis, so this will be nothing out of the ordinary, believe me.”

When the hack arrived at
la
Steele’s expensive establishment on the edge of Mayfair, Lord Linden escorted Katie in and handed her into the care of Laurel’s astonished French maid, with instructions that Katie be given a meal and a bed. The readiness with which he was obeyed told its own story of Lord Linden’s power in this household. And so, by the time Miss Steele came home, Katie had long since been tucked into a luxurious guest bed and fallen into a reassuring dreamworld.

Laurel had not been among those honored by an invitation to Lady Brixton’s
soiree
, but certain of the gentlemen who had been there had later joined a rather more free and easy party at a discreet establishment in Pall Mall, at which
la
Steele had chosen to appear. She had listened with great amusement to the tale of how Linden’s latest toy doll had made him again the center of scandal and conjecture. A nasty little smile itched at her lips as she breezed into her foyer and tossed her cashmere shawl to her waiting maid.

“
Bonsoir
, Madame,” said the maid, smoothing the shawl tenderly over the curve of her arm.

“‘Lo, Antoinette. I shall retire right away, so you may have these lights snuffed,” said Laurel, starting to mount her staircase.

“
Oui
, Madame,” said Antoinette. “Shall I tell Lord Linden that he is to go upstairs?”

“Lord Linden? But surely he isn’t here? They say he left Lady Brixton’s earlier, and with his hands quite, quite full. When did he come?”

“One hour ago, perhaps more. His lordship brought with him a
jeune file
with great blue eyes and red hair. He said I was to put her to a bed, and
maintenant
, she is sleeping in the green bedroom. Madame doesn’t approve?” asked Antoinette, seeing a slowly dawning fury on Laurel’s face.

“Damnation, no! Madame does not approve I How dare he? Oh, when I get my hands on him… where is he?” stormed
la
Steele, no longer finding Lord Linden’s conduct so amusing.

Antoinette indicated the library so Laurel stalked purposefully to that room, murder blazing in her eyes. She found Lord Linden comfortably established on a serpentine-top sofa with his shapely legs stretched out before him, boot heels resting on the fragile surface of a fine Jamaican tea-table. Miss Steele ground her teeth.

“Lesley, this is it! I won’t have it, do you hear?”

Lord Linden had been engaged in a desultory perusal of a volume of execrable and rather smutty poetry but now he cast it aside to gaze up at his sometime mistress.

“I hear you, the servants hear you, and probably your neighbors down the street can hear you,” said Linden, who rarely wasted energy on tact when he was not disposed to do so. “Lord, you keep late hours, Laurel. It’s after three o’clock. Must be hell on your complexion.”

There were times when Miss Steele could be diverted from the issue at hand by Linden’s insults, but this was not one of them.

“Lesley, you’re a provoking, promiscuous blackguard,” said Laurel wrathfully.

“
Magnifique
, Laurel. You should tread the boards. You’ve always told me I’m a provoking, promiscuous blackguard. Why have apoplexy about something that’s well established?” Lord Linden wore a faint, malicious smile.

“But this is the first time that you’ve ever dared to bring a… oh, Another Interest of yours into my home!” snapped Laurel.

“Jealous?” he asked provocatively.

“No! Lud, I pity the creature. At least I’ve never had the misfortune to be your financial dependent. Oh, Lesley, how could you bring her here?”

Lord Linden lifted his long legs slowly from the table and smiled disarmingly at Laurel. “My dear, I had no place else to take her.”

“Well, Lesley,
my
dear,” Laurel’s voice dripped honey, “perhaps I could suggest something. Why don’t you take her and dump her back into whatever gutter you pulled her from originally?”

Lord Linden unwound his long body from the sofa, crossed to a dainty wine cellarette and poured Laurel a brandy, saying casually that she’d been robbed if she’d paid more than a shilling a bottle for the insipid stuff. Laurel found herself fast approaching hysteria.

“Damn you, Lesley, will you listen to me?” she cried, stamping her foot. “I don’t want to drink brandy, I don’t want to talk about brandy and I don’t want to think about brandy. All I want is for you to go upstairs, wake up your little doxy and get her out of my house!” This last sentence ended on a note bearing an unfortunate resemblance to a scream. Lord Linden handed the brandy to Laurel with a distinctly dangerous glint in his eye. He spoke calmly and deliberately.

“Don’t, Laurel. Be mad at me if you like. But don’t let it become a tantrum. My temper’s never sweetened enough to accommodate them, as well you know.”

Laurel hesitated. She knew from painful experience that Linden could only be tried so far before he was apt to forget chivalry. Laurel clearly remembered a time when she had nourished hopes of being enthroned as Linden’s primary mistress. She had reproached him for one of his multiple infidelities. Finally, exasperated by his lack of response, she had lost her temper and slapped him, and Linden had retaliated automatically with a blow that had necessitated her retirement from company for some few weeks with a blackened eye. Uneasily she recalled that far from demonstrating the least remorse, Linden had callously expressed the pious hope that she would take the incident as a lesson governing her future dealings with him.

Fretfully, Laurel turned from him and twisted her hands together. “It’s too much, Lesley. Truly. You can’t expect me to house your light o’ love.” She turned back to him, trying hard to maintain control of her voice. “Lesley, the chit is too much
cause célèbre
after her appearance at Lady Brixton’s. The tale is already common tongue. I’d be a laughingstock if it were known I’d taken her in.”

Linden looked bored. “No one will hear about it from me. And if word gets out, you can think of some convincing tale. Besides, she’s not my mistress, so you won’t be lying. Not that I think that would bother you,” he added carelessly.

Laurel gave an unladylike snort. “Not your mistress indeed! After the way the half-naked chit ran into Lady Brixton’s parlor, clasping at your shirt and prattling on about your bedroom. I wonder that you’ve the nerve to hand me such a faradiddle.”

“I didn’t think you’d believe me, but it’s true. I’ve never laid hands on the chit.” The sable eyes sparkled. “Actually, I did lay hands on her, but it came to nothing because she wouldn’t have me.”

“A likely story,” sneered
la
Steele. “Since when are there girls you lay hands on who don’t become your lovers?”

“As a matter of fact, my sweet life, there are plenty of them,” said Linden nastily, his voice hard with sarcasm. “You see, I only boast of my successes.”

“I don’t believe you.” Laurel was unable to visualize a lady with resolution enough to withstand Lord Linden’s charm, which she knew could be devastating.

Linden shrugged and flung himself into a large, winged armchair. “Then why don’t we send for a physician so you can have her examined?” he said with an intensely unpleasant flippancy. “Use your mind, Laurel. If she were my skit, why would I bring her here instead of setting her up in a house in Chelsea? She’s just a poor frightened baby with pitifully little knowledge of the world. She won’t be here long, only until I can find her father—he’s disappeared to God knows where.”

“Oh, and hasn’t your paragon any relations to see her through this crisis?” asked Laurel acidly.

“She’s Kendricks’s daughter.”

“What! The Bad Baron? That wayward, unprincipled ivory turner? And you’ve brought his daughter into
my
house? My God, Kendricks is a pariah, blacklisted from every club in town. Lesley, I’ll be ruined!” Laurel stamped her feet in good earnest.

Lord Linden watched her angry perambulations serenely. He knew her well and could play her like an angler would a hooked carp. The carrot and the stick; he had used enough stick, now it was time for the carrot. He looked up at her. “Come here.” She stood still and regarded him hostilely. “Come here. Or do you want me to come to get you?” Misliking the look in his eyes, Miss Steele sullenly crossed to kneel by Lord Linden’s chair. She folded her arms, lay them across Linden’s knees and rested her chin on her wrists, looking angrily into his velvet eyes. Linden patted her forehead speculatively with one finger.

“Laurel, will you keep her for a few days out of, er, affection for me?”

“No!”

“Will you do it if I buy you something?” he said, trying not to smile and only half succeeding.

Laurel was avaricious to the very soul. She continued to pout, but a coy gleam entered her eyes that Lord Linden knew well. Silly, transparent jade, thought Linden. This is going to cost me.

“It would have to be diamonds at the very least,” purred Laurel.

Linden grinned cheerfully. “Devil take it, Laurel. Do you think I’d sit and dicker with you like a damn bourgeois? You can have the crown jewels if you like, but mind, I don’t want the chit mistreated.”

“Oh, la, mistreated, is it? Why this sudden spate of philanthropy? So unlike you, my sweet rogue.” Laurel reached up to run a finger gently over Lord Linden’s lips. She turned her face slightly to one side, letting her own lips graze his tantalizingly, and was pleased with the slow, sensual smile that darkened and tamed his opaque sable eyes.

Linden began, one by one, to remove the pins that restrained Laurel’s elegant coiffure. His smile broadened and just for a moment, became heart-stoppingly boyish, though when he spoke, it was with his same cool derisive drawl. “I must be softening in my old age.”

“Do you think so?” murmured Laurel. “I don’t remember you softening the last time you mistreated me…” And she raised her mouth invitingly.

It was an elegant room. The walls were hung in sculptured scarlet brocade ornamented with gilded girandole mirrors. The faded pastels of the seventeenth-century French tapestry which covered the far wall depicted the classical courtship of Zeus and Leda. A mammoth tent bed, however, was undoubtedly the
piece de resistance
of the bedroom. Miss Steele, now lying among the cool satin sheets, was wont to confide happily that she had spent more money on that bed than on any other single piece of furniture in her townhouse. Indeed, it was a gorgeous object. Flanked with satinwood columns inlaid with green laureling, mounted with bronze capitals and bases, its massive canopy dripped streaming layers of cranberry silk and supported a silver-veined mirror positioned directly over the bed. The mirror itself was festooned with hundreds of nodding ostrich plumes dyed to an overbrilliant gold. Gorgeous.

This splendor was not wasted on Katie, who was silhouetted against the faint morning sunlight filtering into the bedroom through the tasselled velvet curtains. Lord Linden might say that the room resembled something from a sixpenny bawdyhouse, but to Katie, it looked like a queen’s chambers.

La
Steele, engulfed in multiple layers of an orchid negligee, was glaring at Katie. “When Lesley said he was sending your clothes, I had no idea your trousseau consisted of a few rags in a cloth bag. Is that—garment—the best you have to offer?”

Katie looked defensively at the shapeless expanse of gray that fell in untidy folds around her ankles. “Yes. It looked nicer when it was blue, but I put too much soap in the washtub once. I have another one, but it has an inkstain on the bodice. I’ve always dressed like this. Papa says ‘fine whiskers cannot take the place of brains.’”

“I’m not interested in what you’ve always done. I’m interested in right now. And I never want to hear you mention your wastrel of a father in my house again! Any man who would thrust his only daughter into a Rookery gin shop ought to be clapped into Bedlam. I detest eccentrics! It’s obvious that you’re sickeningly beautiful, but I won’t, won’t have you skipping around my house looking like something from the circus. I’ve seen better looking coverings on a peck of potatoes. Even those breeches you wore at Linden’s were more attractive. Look at you, your hair looks like unsheared lamb’s wool and I have not the slightest doubt that you’ve got dirt beneath your fingernails. Antoinette! Have a tub of hot water fetched immediately!”

Katie might have bloodlines that stretched back to William the Conqueror, but her upbringing had been haphazardly plebian. Sponge baths were the rule in her life, and she had a peasant’s conviction that those individuals so imprudent as to immerse themselves into a hip bath might soon expect their demise from an inflammation of the lung. Thus it took the unified and, at times, violent efforts of Laurel and her maid to bathe her. Katie suffered under their vigorously applied ablutions and tingled with frustration and embarrassment as they rubbed her dry with hard towelling.

“Now, observe, ‘Toinette,” said Laurel, circling about Katie where she stood forlornly in the middle of the room, tiny rivers of water coursing down her back from her wet head. “Observe how the charms of youth are wasted on the young.”

Antoinette giggled. Katie fairly shriveled, her arms crossed modestly in front of her pink, blushing body. She gazed longingly at the gray frock crumpled in the corner. Laurel caught the direction of Katie’s gaze and snatched the dress from the floor, holding it by thumb and forefinger.

“‘Toinette. Remove this thing and have it burned.”