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That’s because there isn’t such a woman, Helene thought uncharitably. Surely she could dismiss him to his carriage now?
“You truly have no feelings for your husband at all?” he said, his lips dancing across her cheekbone.
“No,” Helene said, trying to make her tone even.
“In God’s truth, a woman after my own heart,” he said, and captured her mouth.
The Earl of Mayne’s kisses would never be called objectionable. They were so sophisticated and sleek, persuasive and delicate, that Helene didn’t even mind them—much. It was just that she really wanted to get back to Rees. She had a thought about the score he had given her.
“I must go,” she said, pulling back. And then added, “alas.”
His eyes had turned very dark. In fact, he looked half out of his mind. “But when can I see you again?”
“I’ll send you a note once I leave Rees’s house,” she said cheerfully.
“A month? I can’t wait a month! Not now that I’ve found you!”
“Well, I’m afraid that you’ll have to. I am utterly incognita, naturally enough. It would be appalling if the news got out.”
“But what has that to do with us? You cannot think to live like a nun in that house for a whole month, when you could be meeting me discreetly?”
Helene quelled a vivid image of Rees towering over her in the park yesterday. She could hardly be more indiscreet.
“You’re blushing again,” he said, seizing her hand. “Come to me, darling. I have a little house in Golden Square, close to Piccadilly—”
“Absolutely not,” Helene said sharply. “I do not engage in surreptitious behavior.”
He looked a little confused, as well he might, given that she was currently acting in a remarkably surreptitious fashion.
“I mean,” she amended, “that our friendship will be conducted utterly in the open. I shall send you a note and request your company once I return to society.” With luck, by then he would have found another married woman and forgotten all about her.
“Of course,” he breathed. “Honesty such as yours is dazzling.”
“Precisely,” Helene said, rather uncomfortably. She rapped on the door and her footman promptly opened it. “I wish you good day, sir.”
Mayne descended, but then he looked back, as if he couldn’t bear to leave. “Helene…”
But she motioned the footman to close the door.
Wasn’t she thinking of a glissando at the end of the seventh stave? Perhaps it would have more effect repeated as an echo at the end of the fifteenth.
Twenty-nine
Vauxhall
They arrived by water. Tom sat in the rear of the boat, conscious of Lina quietly sitting beside him. She was always quiet when Helene was nearby, almost as if she were trying not to be noticed. He missed her throaty chuckle. But then—and the realization felt like a stab to the chest—perhaps her silence reflected pain, due to seeing Rees with his wife.
The waterman in the front pulled the boat through the waves with one mighty heave of his oars after another. The water was a lightless, lurid black, but rays from the lantern hanging at the prow caught drops sliding from the paddles, turning them silver, like black diamonds. There was a very un-vicarlike excitement in Tom’s stomach. He had never been to Vauxhall; men of God didn’t normally entertain themselves with such indecorous amusement.
As they neared the steps leading from the Thames he could hear a dim cacophany of noise, the sound of an orchestra in the distance, the humming sound of visitors, the calls of hucksters wandering the grounds. The boat docked before the entrance and they all traipsed through the door, emerging onto a broad walk. Dusk was drawing on quickly now, and the gardens that stretched as far as he could see were lit by gaslights strung through the trees. The lamps looked like small candles, burning uncertainly in a breeze, and certainly providing no proper illumination. No wonder Vauxhall had such a bad reputation, he thought. A young woman could easily get lost in the maze of paths, alone or with a companion.
There was a voluptuous smell in the air too, one that stirred all his senses. Helene’s friend Lady Bonnington was exclaiming over the same scent.
“Evening primroses,” her husband told her.
Lady Bonnington was wearing a cloak of deep green and a loo mask that emphasized her mouth. But Lina was an easy rival for her, less fleshy, less indecorous, far more beautiful, to Tom’s mind. What was he doing, comparing two women’s mouths? Had he lost himself, the securely proper self he had always been? Reverend Thomas Holland wasn’t interested in comparing women’s mouths!
His attention wandered again. Would he be Lina’s companion? Would they lose themselves on a path, walking side by side?
