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Tom stared up at her, stupefied. Even Meggin stopped crying. The music rolled off the walls. She had the largest voice that Tom had ever heard, a gloriously rich, velvety, dangerous voice. At the very top of the stairs she paused and grinned down at him, looking the picture of a godless wench, her body softly gleaming through peach-colored silk, hair rippling past her shoulders, ruby lips laughing. “This is my favorite verse,” she announced. “Do pay attention. A thousand ages in thy sight are like an evening gone. Short as the watch that ends the night, before the rising sun.” She turned and kept singing, the words falling to them like silken rain as she walked away down a corridor.

“Blimey!” the ostler muttered. “There’s a cracked-brained one, for you. Bedlam, this is.”

Tom stood absolutely still, staring up the stairs. He felt as if he’d been poleaxed. He could feel Meggin pulling at his hand, and he was aware that the ostler wanted to be paid for tossing his boxes to the ground. But the only thing he could think of was that girl’s rosy mouth, and the way she laughed, and the way her voice flew all the way to the rafters of the dusty antechamber, and (God forgive him) the way her hips swayed in that peach-colored negligee.

Eleven

Marital Consummation

“Well, for God’s sake, Helene, it’s not as if you’d be doing it for pleasure. At least I won’t give you a disease which, let me point out, is entirely possible if you dally with a Frenchman. Everyone knows that Frenchmen have the pox.”

“Not Mayne,” Helene said weakly. But in truth, she wasn’t entirely sure what the pox was. It didn’t sound pleasant.

Rees was down to his smalls now. “You get the pox from sleeping with the wrong sort of women,” he said, quite as if he weren’t unbuttoning his most intimate undergarments in Lady Hamilton’s music room.

“I will not do this with you!” Helene hissed.

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t wish to!”

“You can’t tell me that you were looking forward to doing the deed with Garret Langham,” Rees said reasonably. “He may be a very pretty man, but you and I both know that your body isn’t really suited to this sort of thing, is it?”

To her utter fury, there was no way to interpret his look but as honest sympathy.

“I’m sorry that Fairfax-Lacy went off and married Beatrix Lennox,” he continued. “But can you honestly tell me that you two were happy in bed?”

Helene swallowed. There was something even worse about being comforted by one’s husband than there had been in failing as a lover to Mr. Fairfax-Lacy.

“It’s the devil and truly unfair,” he was saying. “But don’t you see, Helene? If you’re that eager for a child, we might as well do the deed now and get it over with. At least it will be my child that inherits my estate. I couldn’t make Mayne’s child into an earl ahead of Tom’s son.”

Helene saw what he meant. She hadn’t even remembered the existence of Rees’s brother Tom. It wasn’t fair to him.

“I’m not a very good earl,” Rees said, “but damn it, I suppose you and I could make a child without too much trouble, and at least I would have done my duty.”

Helene bit her lip. “Esme says it only takes one time,” she heard herself say.

Rees put his hands on her shoulders. “Right. So would you mind giving up Mayne and allowing me to father the child instead?”

“All right,” she said, swallowing. It was rather disappointing, but she knew perfectly well that once Mayne had reached a certain point, she wouldn’t have liked it any more than she did with Rees, years ago. So what was the difference, really?

Then she realized that Rees was staring at her. “Your hair’s gone,” he said.

Helene tossed her head, and felt the pure glory of weightlessness again. “I cut it all off.”

“And where did you get that gown? No wonder I found Mayne in here with you. That gown is a siren call to rakehells.”

Helene resisted the impulse to cover her breasts with her hands. Mayne had said they were beautiful. “If you’re going to laugh at my chest, why don’t you get it out of the way immediately,” she said coolly.

“I’m not,” he said, his voice rather strangled with surprise.

Helene looked down at her gown. It was already crumpled by the exertions of the evening, so she needn’t worry about taking it off and further exposing her inadequacies. “I suppose we might as well simply get it over with,” she said, turning and walking back to the couch. “Are you going to remove your shirt?”

He followed her and stood looking at her as she lay down. “Are you certain that you wish to do this, Helene?”

She actually smiled. “Yes. I think you’re right. It’s such a relief not to have to pretend with you. I’m not going to enjoy this much, but I would be very, very grateful if we could make a child.”

“I wish that wasn’t the case for you,” Rees said.