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Prologue
Aphrodite’s Club,
London
Late Spring 1850
Aphrodite, the famous courtesan, sat forward in her Egyptian style chair, her dark eyes bright with curiosity. “Lady Ellerslie. It isn’t often that a woman of your position and social standing comes to see me at my club. Please, tell me what it is you wish from me, and I will make it come true.”
“Madame, if only it were that simple.”
“But perhaps it is. Tell me and we will see.”
Portia, Lady Ellerslie, hesitated, and for a moment her well-bred calm wavered, giving the courtesan a glimpse of the seething emotion she was trying so hard to hide. “I am relying upon your discretion,” she said with quiet dignity.
“We are all most discreet here, my lady.”
It had seemed so straightforward in the hansom cab on her way here, but now she was face-to-face with the woman…No, it wasn’t straightforward at all. But she had made up her mind to it, and once she decided on a thing, she went through with it. Besides, what was the alternative? Creep back home and do nothing? She could not bear it, not for another day, not for another moment.
Not for another night.
Portia drew a deep breath. “I am a widow, madame, as you know. My position is such that I must be extremely cautious, which is why I have come here today in a cab, wearing a veil and bearing a false name.”
Aphrodite inclined her head, but her eyes said she had heard all this many times before. That gave Portia some comfort. She wasn’t alone after all; there were others like her, who were desperate to escape the strictures society had imposed upon them.
Escape?
No, escape was impossible, but perhaps just for a brief time she might forget what was expected of her and pretend to be someone else.
“You would like some coffee or tea?” Aphrodite murmured when Portia did not go on. “A glass of something stronger, perhaps, to give you courage?”
“No, please, I don’t want anything to drink,” Portia said in frustration, her gloved hands clenching her reticule. Suddenly, the words spilled out of her, like a dam that had broken: “You are being polite, and I don’t want politeness and good manners, I don’t want to be hemmed in and suffocated with good intentions, I don’t want to pretend to be happy when I am sad, and bite back my tears and my anger, to be so…so devoid of emotion because in the world I live in it is not the done thing to show how one truly feels…”
Aphrodite smiled and her dark eyes glittered. “Go on, Lady Ellerslie.”
Her inner feelings, once set free, could not be stemmed, nor could her sense of desperation. “Madame, just for one night, for one hour, I want to be a living woman again and not a marble memorial to my dead husband.”
Silence hung heavy in the small, chic room. Portia wished she could look away from the courtesan, but that would be cowardly—a denial of the words she had just spoken—so she kept her gaze still and steady. As if she were not quaking in her boots.
“I will let you in on a little secret,” Aphrodite said, her voice conspiratorial. “You are not the only English lady of quality who has come here seeking my help, and you will not be the last.”
“I am not? What is the world coming to!” She sounded just like the queen, Victoria, as she had meant to, but her smile took away the sting.
“The world is designed by men, my lady. I will say to you what I said to those others. There is absolutely nothing wrong in a woman wishing to satisfy her sensual needs; it is a natural thing. But in your situation you are taking a greater risk, and it might be safer, and more convenient, if you took a lover from among your own circle. A friend? A servant?”
Portia shook her head. “No. I must be beyond reproach, madame, and if the merest whisper reached the ears of my family or the palace…I cannot soil my husband’s spotless memory. You understand that merely by being here today I put all in jeopardy?”
Aphrodite inclined her head. “You must be seen to uphold the pure perfection of Victorian womanhood,” she mocked gently. “I understand very well, my lady, and I sympathize with your dilemma. You have been placed upon a pedestal and it is lonely up there. Especially if you are a sensual woman, and I think that you are. Forgive me, but can you not remarry? It has been two years since Lord Ellerslie died.”
Portia wondered whether such a question was impertinent. Probably it was, but she did not care. This was the frankest conversation she’d had with a woman in many years, perhaps in the whole of her life. She hadn’t realized until now that such co
nversations were even permitted to take place. Perhaps they weren’t.
The thought that she might be breaking one of those interminable “rules” made her feel deliciously wicked.
“I do not think my remarrying would be looked upon favorably. I am the epitome of the faithful widow in mourning for her hero husband, and if I remarried, then the spell would be broken. Victoria—Her Majesty the Queen—prefers me to remain as I am. She is fond of telling me that I am a beacon that others may follow. Britannia in widow’s weeds.”
Unfortunately it was all too true. But it was what she had wanted, after all. Her mother’s ambition and pride had brought her to this point, and her own sense of duty. Would she really want to change places with some happily married little cottage wife? If she was trapped, then it was a trap of her making and one she was content to inhabit—most of the time.
“So, you do not wish to take a lover and you cannot remarry. Instead you have come to me. Let me guess, you want an evening of passion, but without any ties or conventions. Just a stranger in one of my pretty boudoirs, with little or no conversation, and then good-bye forever.”
If Portia was the sort to blush, she might have done so now, but hers was the cool, fair beauty of the English rose, and she had grown very clever at hiding her true feelings behind it.
“You have guessed right, Madame Aphrodite. That is exactly what I want.”
“Connection with a man you do not know?” the courtesan asked, speaking forthrightly.
Portia tilted up her chin so there would be no mistake. “Yes.”
Aphrodite smiled. “I am not trying to shock you, my lady. I like to be frank with my clients, and then there can be no misunderstandings.”
“I am grateful for your plain speaking. It is not something I am used to. I find it refreshing, Madame.”
“Then let me be plain again. You are not a virgin? I ask because your husband was a great deal older than you. He was still capable?”
Even her mother had not asked such a thing. Her mother would probably have fainted if she had discussed her husband’s prowess in the bedroom. It delighted Portia to be able to say out loud secrets she had kept for ten years. “He was capable, but I was a virgin before I married. As a young girl I was kept so confined that there would have been no chance to be other than a virgin. But I wasn’t interested in the young men about me. I was a serious girl, not inclined to flights of fancy or dreams of love, and my future had been drummed into me so thoroughly that I believed I had no other choice than to marry well. The family fortunes were riding on me, madame, and to hear such a thing day after day…well, I did not take it lightly.”
It was true; well, mostly. There had been one man…a boy. Someone she had, briefly, fallen in love with and longed to give herself to, in the dreamy, innocent way of the inexperienced. Not that the boy knew that. They barely spoke, but she had fantasized about him all one summer. Come autumn, she was married. She hadn’t thought of him for years, her life had changed so much, and then, one day, there he was. Inside her head. Her young and innocent love…only now her feelings were not so innocent.
Aphrodite didn’t need to know that. Nor that he had taken a leading role in the fantasies she indulged in alone at night. Those dark wicked fantasies.
“After I married my husband I…I found I enjoyed the physical part of my marriage, but as you say, my husband was much older than me, and before long he became too ill to take the part of a husband. He was ill for many years before he died. That is not to say I begrudge my time as his nurse, but there was no physical intimacy between us.”
“I see, my lady. You loved him, but now he is gone and for the sake of the public, the queen, your family, you must remain a perpetual widow.”
“Yes.”
“He was a national hero. They wish to preserve what is left of him.”
“I do not mean to denigrate his name, I would never do that. But I am twenty-seven years of age, and I do not want to be old just yet. I want to feel what it is to be a woman again. I think if I could spend some time with a man who is young and virile, experience what other women take for granted, then I would be satisfied. Once would be enough.”
Aphrodite’s heavily ringed fingers tapped on the arm of her chair. “I hope you are right, but in my experience ‘once’ is sometimes the start of something rather than the finish of it.” Her voice had taken on a warning note.
Portia smiled, confident she was in control. “I am willing to take that risk.”
Chapter 1
It was far too early to go home, Marcus decided as he strolled though Covent Garden. Besides, Sebastian and Francesca would be there, glowing with connubial bliss. Since his brother had married, he didn’t want to go anywhere unless Francesca was with him—in short he’d become a complete bore. Here he was, Marcus thought, freed from his stewardship of Worthorne Manor and a brief, disastrous stint in the Hussars, ready to experience all that London had to offer, and with no one to share it.
