The Water Nymph: The Arboretti Family Saga - Book Two Page 7

  Sophie rose from the tub, frowned at the round confection, and then turned her frown on Emme. “Where is the orange cake?”

  Emme managed to unlock her jaw. “Richards says there is no need to make orange cake when you order a dozen meringues from Sweetson the baker to be delivered every week.”

  “Meringues are quite delicious,” Octavia added in a slightly stilted tone.

  “Maybe,” Sophie said, waving the comment aside. “But they are not orange cakes and I did not order them. Why would I order anything from anyone else when I have Richards—Satan’s knockers!” Sophie had just remembered the second thing she had forgotten to remember earlier, and it was all thanks to the meringue. Relieved, and feeling much better after her bath, she stepped out of the tub, scooped the fluffy confection from the floor, kissed it, and tossed it out the window. Then she danced toward Emme and gave her a kiss likewise. “Thank you. It would never have come back to me if not for you. Now, be wonderful and tell Richards that I don’t know anything about ordering meringues and I am still begging for orange cake.”

  She watched the now doubly stunned Emme totter out of the room, and then swung toward Octavia. “I need clothes, women’s clothes, but easy to move in,” she explained.

  Octavia and Emme had grown accustomed to Sophie’s unusual behavior and no longer thought twice when she went from pensive to ebullient in the blink of an eye, but this business of sleeping with men and kissing desserts was out of the ordinary, even for her. Beginning to wonder if indeed the mustache paste had made Sophie mad, Octavia opened the armoire that was stuffed with the gowns she had designed for her friend and selected a pale blue silk.

  “No, not that one,” Sophie said, shaking her head, and Octavia felt that her worst fears were confirmed. Sophie had never, in all their years together, expressed an opinion about her clothes.

  “What about the green gown?” Sophie asked. “The new one, with the other green on the bottom and that stuff all over the front.”

  This description sounded more in character, but even so Octavia had to bite her tongue to keep from asking if Sophie would not rather lie down—say for two weeks, perhaps in a comfy apartment at Bedlam—as she extracted the requested gown from the armoire. It was one of her recent designs, light green silk the color of a young apple, over a darker green silk skirt. The “stuff” on the front was actually elaborate embroidery work depicting delicate vines that curved over the bodice, drawing the eye and emphasizing its low, square cut. Flowers of light pink, blue, and purple grew out of the vines, and just above the left breast there was a small bumblebee. Octavia signed all of her gowns with a bee, causing that humble insect to become the most sought after object of adornment in London for the past two seasons. Women eyed one another with disdain if there was no bee visible and scrutinized each other’s embroidery to learn if it was a real Octavia Apia or a sham. But Sophie paid attention to none of this as she flounced miserably in and out of balls, Octavia’s best advertisement and London’s most envied model, nor was she thinking about it now.

  No, she was not thinking about the many compliments she had received on the gown before, or the fact that it made her eyes look remarkably green, or the hungry, desperate way every man had gazed at her the last time she wore it out, or that she had been described the next day, in public, as the most beautiful woman in London. She had chosen it, she knew, only because she remembered it was comfortable and not on the off chance that the man who lived in the palace across the street might look out his window as she departed. Or rather, exactly on that off chance, so that she could show the callow beetle that she did not care what he thought of her. Or something like that.

  As she stepped out of the house, brushing from her riding cloak, crumbs of the orange cake she had inhaled, she suddenly remembered the third thing she had forgotten. She hesitated for a moment, about to go back in and ask Octavia about the pistol, but decided against it. She could ask her later, Sophie thought, mounting her dappled mare and taking the reins from the stable-girl, when she returned home to eat two dozen more cakes.

  Setting out across London, she could hardly have known that there would be no later. Sophie Champion would not be going back to Hen House. Not later. Not ever.

  This was no way for the Phoenix to be spending his day, Crispin thought to himself as he shifted uncomfortably on the unsteady stool-like torture apparatus and started on the final bundle of papers. He would rather have been out facing a group of Spanish brigands armed to the teeth desperately protecting their unlawfully collected treasure, or the French royal firing squad with pistols loaded, or even a Turkish merchant who had padded his body with gunpowder that would explode at the merest touch by another person and embarked upon a suicide mission to blow up the English ambassador’s residence in Constantinople. He would rather have been dealing with any of these (as he had—the firing squad more than once, in fact) than sorting through other people’s perfumed love letters in someone else’s perfumed den of iniquity.

  Indeed, if Crispin had known that Richard Tottle’s personal apartments would be covered almost entirely in pink silk, he never would have come. The walls, the doors, the bed, the divan, the curtains, all were of pink silk, and what could not be covered in silk was at least made pink. The floor was topped with a carpet needlepointed in a thousand pink roses, the mirror was framed with pink glass flowers, the fireplace was surrounded with pink tiles, portraits of pink women smiled out of pink frames… not even the chamber pot, Crispin was appalled to see, had escaped the plague of pinkness. Consulting his pocket watch, he saw that he had been there for less than an hour, even if it felt like five.

  Having given up on finding the other half of the list Tottle had been clutching when he died, Crispin decided to render it meaningless by destroying the cipher that had been used to encode it, which anyone would need to decode it. He himself had the only other copy, and without it the list was completely illegible. But so far Crispin’s searching had been in vain: he had been unable to find the cipher anywhere, and he did not know how much longer he could last in Tottle’s salmon-pink sanctuary. He had just decided to take the love letters he was sorting through with him and look at them in the soothing space of his dark-wood-and-burgundy library, when he heard the footsteps on the stairs.

  Noting that they did not stop at the floor below, where the offices were, but continued up toward the door to the pink paradise, he carefully replaced the letters in the top compartment of the (pink) desk and concealed himself among the (pink) drapes.

  Whoever was on the other side of the door was no professional. Not only had they crept up the stairs noisily enough to alert the dead, but they were now struggling with the simple lock on the door. He was half inclined to slide across the room and undo the lock for them, if only to ease the tension of waiting, but suddenly the door opened and the footsteps entered the room.

  Sophie was glad there was no one there to see her gaping. She had never been in a room like this before, had only vaguely imagined that such places existed. There could be no doubt that it was consecrated entirely to pleasure, from the triple-wide bed to the paintings of women—Satan’s knockers, what were they doing to that satyr in the one between the windows?—to the strange musky odor that permeated the air. She moved around the room slowly, taking in the proliferation of pink furnishings, astutely studying the paintings (could her leg go in that direction? she wondered, extending one of them out slightly as she studied a woman who was ecstatically making love with a swan) and feeling completely overwhelmed.

  And perhaps a bit ill, a sort of relapse of her feelings from the night before. She had just removed her riding cloak, having begun to feel a little warm, and started to wonder what could be causing the illness now, since the mustache was gone, when the pink curtains on her right stirred slightly and a figure emerged.

  “Don Alfonso. What a pleasant surprise,” Crispin said in a voice that left it unclear whether he meant it sincerely or as the saltiest sarcasm. “You
have shaved.”

  Sophie should have known this would happen, she told herself, smoothing the skirt of her gown. She should have expected him to be there, she thought as she ensured her bodice was straight, making a mess of things, probably stealing things so that he would win their bet. That thought was immediately followed by another, and before she could stop herself she looked at him and said, “You bastard.”

  “Perhaps Miss Champion should take lessons from Don Alfonso about the basics of courtesy. Generally it is considered good form to wish someone good day before belittling their bloodlines.”

  “You drugged me,” Sophie replied, ignoring his etiquette pointers. “You put something in the wine last night and drugged me so that you could get here before me and take away important evidence.”

  Crispin raised his eyebrows. “Ingenious. I had not even realized it myself. With your powers of deduction, evidence would just be a hindrance.”

  “Then you admit it?”

  “Unfortunately, while I enjoy your company excessively, I did nothing to prolong your visit to my house last night. You yourself mentioned that your last meal had been days before, and I suspect that the wine you gulped like a sailor just went to your head.” Noting that she was about to protest, Crispin went on. “Do not imagine that I enjoyed trying to sleep through your snores on my divan.”

  Sophie’s eyes grew huge with indignation. “I do not snore.”

  “You most certainly do. At first I thought one of the wild bulls from the bullbaiting ring must have run away and invaded the room, but then I realized it was just you.” Despite concentrating on not laughing uproariously, Crispin still had plenty of attention left over for watching Sophie’s rising wrath. However, he now saw he had made a mistake, because he had not anticipated that once antagonized she would inhale and exhale quite so deeply, making it impossible not to look at the low-cut bodice of her dress, or that she would color quite so marvelously against its green silk. What had begun as an exercise to unsettle her, seemed to be unsettling him instead, and Crispin had to remind himself that he had a job to do, a very important job, no part of which involved throwing the woman before him on the pink bed and making love to her. Indeed, the sooner he got away from her, the better off he would be.

  Sophie shared his opinion. She had just realized, with horror, that she had wronged Octavia. It was not the mustache paste that made her ill; it was the Earl of Sandal. He was not only obnoxious but noxious as well. She felt distinctly sick in his presence, and it was not helped any by the enormous bed just behind her, or the paintings covering the walls. The best thing to do was to get away from him as soon as possible.

  “I humbly beg your pardon,” Sophie said, her manner suggesting new meanings for the words “humbly beg,” “and I assure you my snores will never bother you again.”

  “Good,” Crispin said with finality.

  “Good,” Sophie echoed. “Now, if you will just show me what you have taken, I will leave here and not trouble you at all.”

  Crispin spread the fingers on his hands and turned them over so she could see both front and back. “Empty,” he explained. “I have taken nothing. Of course, if you do not believe me, I would be happy to remove my clothes and let you inspect them yourself.”

  This was very bad. The thought of sharing the pink Parnassus with him, naked, occasioned a new wave of the spiced-wine warmness that made Sophie unsteady on her feet, and she stepped backward, until she felt the supporting structure of the bed behind her knees. “I would rather let you win the bet than have to see you unclad,” she told him. “In fact, I would rather let you win the bet than have to see you at all. I will go down to Richard Tottle’s office on the floor below and look around until you have finished here.”

  Crispin was disgustingly gallant. “I should hate to have it said that I chased a lady out of a chamber such as this. I will go downstairs and allow you to stay here, studying the paintings unfettered. With practice, I think, you could master that position with the swan.”

  The door closed on his back before Sophie could tell him that he was by far the most terrifically horrible millipede in all London, probably in all England, possibly in all the world. There were about a dozen other unflattering adjectives longing to push themselves out of her lips, but she bit them back and told herself to concentrate on the task at hand. She went first to the bundles of love letters that Crispin had been flipping through earlier, and untying them, she began to read. They appeared to be notes left by the two people who shared the room when one or the other was absent. Half the bundles, tied with a silver cord, were signed “Your forever loving, Dickie.” That had to be the private nickname of Richard Tottle. The other packets, tied with gold cord, were all concluded with the words “Hundreds of kisses from your dearest Darling.” Sophie read the salutation for the fourteenth time and groaned. If she had hoped to glean any information from Richard Tottle’s lover, Sophie now saw, she was bound to be disappointed. How could she possibly figure out which of the hordes of darling women in London “Dickie” had been receiving hundreds of kisses from? And why couldn’t she have used a real name like normal people? Sophie had begun pacing around the room, flapping one of the offending letters in each hand, when the door burst open and a man entered.

  “Constable,” he pronounced gruffly as he took her arm. “Come with me, miss. You are under arrest.”

  Chapter Six

  The constable had to drag Sophie down the stairs. She was too stunned to speak, or even fight, which suited him just fine. When they reached the landing in front of the office, he ducked in and said, “I’ll take the chambermaid back to Newgate for questioning.”

  A fat man detached himself from the group going through the stacks and stacks of paper in the office, and approached very close. “She’s a tender morsel,” he said, squinting at Sophie myopically. “Why not let us do the questioning here?”

  Sophie began to stir a little, but the constable tightened his grip on her arm. “I got my orders,” he told the other man. “Take any witnesses to the prison for questioning, those are my orders, and I’m going to follow them.”

  The fat man did not spare a glance for the speaker but kept his eyes on Sophie and periodically licked his lips. “Very well,” he agreed finally, giving his belly a doleful pat. “But don’t forget to save some for the rest of us. A fine dish like that, you eat too much and you’ll be sorry later.”

  The constable grinned, and directed his charge down the remaining stairs. They had just shut the door of RICHARD TOTTLE, ESQ., PRINTER TO THE QUEEN’S place of business, when Sophie hissed through closed teeth, “What the devil do you think you are doing?”

  “Saving your life,” Crispin hissed back from under the hat he was wearing as a disguise, his hand not leaving her arm. “The final entry in Richard Tottle’s account book is for a payment of one thousand two hundred pounds from ‘Sophie Champion’ for ‘Information.’ And apparently, based on what those constables in there were saying, someone found the tattered remnants of a bill of credit for that amount signed by you in Richard Tottle’s purse. Another group of them have already been dispatched to your house to arrest you. Unless for some reason you would relish being apprehended by that charming and hungry gentleman in there, I suggest you come along quietly.”

  “What do you mean,” Sophie asked, stuck back in the first part of his statement, “that there is an entry in Richard Tottle’s account book under my name?”

  “I should think that even with your rudimentary mental capacity that easy statement should make sense,” Crispin growled, dragging her onto his horse in front of him.

  “And I should think that even with your glaring ignorance of the laws of civilized society, you would have learned that forcing women against their will onto your horse and insulting them is unacceptable. I demand that you let me down this moment. I have my own mount.”

  “Good.” Crispin’s grasp around her waist tightened. “By leaving your mount here, we g
uarantee that the constables will start their search for Sophie Champion in this neighborhood and give you time to get out of London.” As he spoke, Crispin took off the ridiculous floppy hat of Tottle’s that he had appropriated when he heard the footsteps on the stairs, stuffed it under his saddle, and signaled his horse into motion with a click of his tongue.

  “What do you mean, ‘get out of London’?” Sophie turned her neck around as far as it would go to face him. “How do I know there really is a warrant out for my arrest? Or that you did not put that entry in the ledger yourself while you were in the office, or leave that bill of credit on the body when you searched it, in order to frame me, so you could win our bet?”

  “Because I am a gentleman,” he told her, eliciting a snort that called into question the status of her own gentle blood. “And because I took the liberty of pouring ink over the last entry in the ledger, to complicate things a little.”

  Slowly, the expression on Sophie’s face changed into one that he had not seen before. “Why?” she asked simply.

  “I would never want you to say I won our bet unfairly,” he evaded. “But you will have to leave London.”

  “I will do no such thing,” Sophie said, still facing him.

  Crispin sighed. “Would you at least agree not to go home? To go and stay somewhere that no one will know about?”

  Sophie’s eyes narrowed, and the thoughts that she had been having, thoughts that mitigated his odiousness from severe to manageable, instantly receded. “Do not for a moment suppose I would agree to move into your house.”

  “Do not for a moment suppose I was going to suggest it,” Crispin returned in the same tone. “No, I was thinking of a friend of mine. He owns many houses in London and would undoubtedly be happy to host you.”

  “I have plenty of friends of my own with whom I can stay,” she said indignantly.