Devilish Lord, Mysterious Miss Read online

  And it was she who urged him, when he had just donned the first set of good quality, brand-new clothes he had ever owned, to walk into White’s and face them all down. She had crowed with laughter when he had walked out, £20,000 the richer.

  It had brought him a measure of satisfaction to pay off the mortgage on Kingsmede, when his father had died. And to pay off his inherited debts out of winnings he’d gleaned from the very men who had fleeced his shiftless parent. Since then, he had gradually been able to make all the improvements to his estate Cora had talked about when she had been there. His tenants might whisper about him, and the way he came by his money, but it did not stop them from being glad he was re-thatching their cottages, or draining low-lying fields to improve their harvests.

  Not that he cared what they thought of him. He was not doing it for them, but to please her. Her opinion was the only one that mattered to him.

  She was the only person he felt any connection with any more.

  Even though she was dead.

  If that made him crazy, then so be it.

  If it was madness that drove him back to the card tables, so that he could hear her muttering about the drunkenness of his opponents as he ruthlessly stripped them of their money, or feel her breath fan his cheek as she blew on his dice for luck, then it beat the alternative! He had not cared that her unseen presence, walking at his side, acted like a barrier between him and the rest of the world.

  She was still there.

  Until Miss Winters had kissed him.

  ‘Cora,’ he moaned again, sagging against the railings in defeat.

  A seller of kindling, pushing his cart before him, shot him a piercing look, before shaking his head and hurrying on.

  He knew what he must look like. He was standing here, in the first light of day, crying out for a woman who had been dead for seven dark, hellishly lonely years. And he didn’t care what anyone might think. If he only had the supernatural powers that people attributed to him, by Lucifer and all that was unholy, he would use them now! If he really knew of some incantation…

  A line from somewhere sprang to mind. Something about three times three times three…

  And even as he muttered what he could remember of what he dimly suspected was something from Shakespeare, a movement from the area steps of a house further down the street caught his eye. A short young woman, modishly yet soberly dressed, in a dark blue coat and poke bonnet, was climbing up on to the pavement. At first, he did not know why, out of all the people bustling about their business, this one insignificant female had attracted his attention. But then she turned to scan the traffic before venturing out into the road, and he caught a glimpse of her face.

  And it felt as though something had sucked all the air from his lungs.

  It was Cora.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ he swore, clutching the railings even harder as his knees threatened to give way beneath him. Somehow, with all that three-times-three business, and invoking unholy powers, he had managed to conjure up her shade! For the last seven years, he had heard her, caught her scent on the breeze, felt her presence, but never, ever had she allowed him so much as one brief glimpse of her…

  ‘Bloody hell!’ he swore again. While he had been standing there, completely stunned at having called up her spirit, or whatever the hell it was had just happened, she had disappeared round the corner. She had walked away from him as though he was of no account. As though she had somewhere far more important to be.

  Uttering another curse, he set off in pursuit. It should have been easy to catch up with her. She did not have that much of a head start. But as he attempted to break into a run, the pavement undulated beneath his feet as though it had a life of its own, throwing him into the path of a furniture mender carrying a bunch of rushes. Lord Matthison had to grab on to the man’s shoulders to steady himself before he could lurch off in the direction Cora had gone.

  For a few terrible minutes, he thought he would never see her again. The streets were full of tradesmen making early deliveries to the houses of the wealthy now, and it was as if the crowds had swallowed her up. Panic brought him out in a cold sweat, until he caught a glimpse of that dark blue coat on the far side of Berkeley Square, and he plunged into the gardens after her.

  She was half-way up Bruton Street before he sighted her again, gliding effortlessly through the throng. He bit back a curse as a rabbit, dangling from the pole of its vendor, struck him full in the face.

  ‘Cora!’ he yelled in desperation as the rabbit seller laid hands on him, angrily demanding something…recompense for the damage to his wares probably, but he paid no heed. ‘Wait!’he cried, thrusting the man rudely aside. He could not let anything prevent him from discovering where Cora was going!

  He saw her half-turn. Felt the moment she recognised him with the force of a punch to the gut. For there was no tenderness, no understanding in her eyes. On the contrary, she recoiled from him, and with a look of horror hitched up her skirts and began to run.

  He tried to run too, but she just kept on getting further and further away from him. She could melt through the throng, because she was a wraith. But his own body was all too solid, so that he was obliged to swerve around, or shove people aside. But he kept his eyes fixed on her. Until the very moment she darted into one of the shops on Conduit Street, and slammed the door behind her.

  He stumbled to a halt on the pavement opposite what turned out to be a modiste’s. A very high-class modiste with the name ‘Madame Pichot’ picked out in gold leaf on a signboard above the door.

  His heart was hammering in his chest, which was still heaving with shortened breath. What was he to do now? Barge into the shop, which probably wasn’t even open to customers yet, and demand they let him speak to the ghost he’d just seen take refuge inside? They would call for the watch, and have him locked up. In an asylum for the insane, most like.

  He bent over, his hands resting on his knees as he fought to get his breath back. And make some sense of what had just happened.

  Why, for God’s sake, had Cora fled from him, the very moment she had finally deigned to let him see her? And what was the significance of bringing him here?

  He straightened up, staring at the shop front as though it might provide him with some answer to this unholy muddle.

  ‘Evening gowns a speciality’, read a card prominently displayed in the window, underneath a sample of the fabulously intricate beadwork that had become all the rage amongst the fashionable this year.

  And a cold thread of foreboding slithered down his spine.

  The very night after Mr Winters had declared his intention to lay Cora’s ghost to rest for good, the first night he’d had a run of such spectacularly bad hands even he could do nothing with them, he had partnered a woman wearing a dress that came from this modiste. He had laid the blame for their defeat at whist at the feet of the woman wearing the expensive gown, a French chit, who had as little grasp of the game as she had of the English language. But in his heart he had known she had nothing to do with his wins or losses.

  All gamblers were superstitious, but he supposed he must be the most superstitious of the lot. Knowing Cora’s influence to be the source of his success, he had taken great pains, from the first day he had sensed her presence, to avoid offending her. He never touched strong liquor, nor did he succumb to the lures cast out by women who were fascinated by his aura of dark menace. How could he have contemplated bedding anyone, even if any woman had ever stirred him on any level, knowing that Cora hovered not far away, watching his every move? Not that she would have watched for long. Her puritanical soul would have been so shocked, she would have fled, perhaps never to return.

  He had been right to take care. Cora’s love was so strong it had reached out to him from beyond the grave. But a love strong enough to cheat death was not a force to be trifled with.

  Miss Winters had kissed him, her father had begun to search for lawyers cunning enough to lay her spirit in the grave for good, and Cora had turne
d her back on him. And getting blind drunk, and shouting curses up at Miss Winters’s windows, had not done him any favours. That slamming door was a clear enough message that even he could read it.

  She had put back the barrier that existed between the living and the dead. And she was on the other side.

  He ran a shaky hand over his face, feeling sick to his stomach.

  He had only survived the last seven years because she had been right there with him. More real to him than all the gibbering idiots who populated the hells he frequented.

  Would she come back to him, he wondered frantically, if he proclaimed the truth about her? He would not care if they declared him insane, and locked him up. He could afford to pay for a nice, cosy cell. It would almost be a relief to stop pretending his life made any sense. To stop hiding the anguish that tortured him night and day. He could just lie in the dark, and rant and curse to his heart’s content.

  Mr Winters would surely abandon his ambition to have his daughter marry a peer, if that peer was a raving lunatic! And even Robbie would reap some benefit. It would appease his quest for justice, to see the man he believed had murdered his sister finally locked away.

  If that was what it took to appease Cora, he decided, his jaw firming, then it would be a small price to pay!

  ‘You wanter cross or not, mister?’a little voice piped up, jerking him out of his darkly disturbing thoughts.

  ‘Cross?’

  A ragged boy with a dirty broom was standing, palm outstretched, gazing up at him expectantly.

  A crossing sweeper.

  ‘No,’ he replied. There was no point.

  No point to anything, any more. He had offended Cora. Driven her away.

  ‘Want me to see if I can get a message to her?’ the lad persisted.

  ‘Message?’

  ‘To the red-haired piece you chased up the street.’

  ‘You saw her?’ Lord Matthison stared at the boy in shock. He had assumed he was the only one who had been able to see her. Especially after the way she had melted through the crowds as though she and they existed on different planes.

  The boy leaned closer, and took an experimental sniff, his perplexed face creasing into a grin.

  ‘Clearer than you, I reckon, by the smell of your breath. Had a heavy night, have yer?’

  Lord Matthison grimaced as the lad’s words sank in.

  He had not taken a drink in seven years. Had been astounded by what a tolerance for gin he seemed to have, marvelling at the fact he was still on his feet. Well, he might be on his feet, but he was sure as hell not sober.

  The woman was real. He had not called some spirit up out of the pit. Cora had not deliberately turned her back on him, run from him, and slammed the door in his face. He had just seen some servant girl climb up the area steps from the servants’entrance, and go about her legitimate business.

  Which had nothing to do with him.

  The fact that she had looked uncannily like Cora was mere coincidence. Or…had she even born that much of a resemblance to his late fiancée? He frowned. He had not been close enough to see her face clearly. It had been her build, and the way she walked, that had convinced him he was seeing a ghost.

  His head began to ache.

  Typical!

  He was getting a hangover before he was even sober.

  He pressed the heels of his hands over his eyes, digging his fingers into his scalp. There was no point in trying to make sense of any of this until he had sobered up.

  ‘Is this your patch?’ he asked the crossing sweeper, running his fingers through his hair.

  ‘Yessir!’ said the lad, rather too loudly for Lord Matthison’s liking.

  ‘Then find out whatever you can about the red-head,’ he said, dipping into his pocket, and flipping the lad a coin, ‘and I shall give you another of these.’

  The boy’s face lit up when he saw it was a crown piece. ‘Right you are! When will you be coming back?’

  ‘I shall not,’he replied with a grimace of distaste. He despised men who loitered on street corners, hoping to catch a glimpse of the hapless female that was currently the object of their prurient interest.

  ‘You will report to my lodgings. What is your name?’

  ‘Grit,’ said the boy, causing Lord Matthison to look at him sharply. And then press his fingers to his throbbing temples. It was all of a piece. The boy he was employing to spy on Cora’s ghost could not possibly have a sensible name like Tom, or Jack! Everything about this night bore all the hallmarks of a nightmare.

  ‘I will tell my manservant, then, that if a short, dirty person answering to the name of Grit comes knocking, that he is to admit you. Or, if I am not there, to extract what information you have, and reward you with another coachwheel.’

  ‘And who might you be?’

  ‘Lord Matthison.’

  He watched the light die from the boy’s eyes. Saw him swallow. Saw him try to hide his consternation. But Grit was too young to quite manage to conceal the belief he had just agreed to serve the devil’s minion. He kissed goodbye to the prospect of ever finding out anything about the red-head who had worked him up into such a state. The lad would never pluck up the courage to venture to his lodgings. Or if he did, his conscience was bound to hold him in check. Even a dirt-poor guttersnipe would think twice about selling information about a defenceless female to a man of Lord Matthison’s reputation.

  ‘In the meantime, perhaps you could find me a cab,’ he drawled, eyeing the shop across the street one last time.And then, because he got a perverse kind of pleasure from playing up to the worst of what people expected of him, he added, ‘I dislike being abroad in daylight.’

  Chapter Two

  Mary dashed across the main shop, through the velvet curtains that divided it from the working areas, and pounded up the three flights of stairs that led to the workroom. The one place where she had learned to feel secure.

  She had no idea why the way that man had emerged from the shadows on the other side of Curzon Street, with his black clothes, black hair and forbidding expression, had shaken her so badly. Or why, for an instant, she had got the peculiar impression that the shadows themselves had thickened, solidified and spawned the living embodiment of her nightmares.

  It was terrifying, though, to feel as if your nightmares had invaded your waking life. Particularly since those nightmares were so vague.

  All she could remember when she woke up from one of them was that there had been something hovering behind her. Something she dared not turn and face. Because she was sure that if she did, it would rear up and swallow her whole. And so she would curl up, trying to make herself disappear, so the Thing would not notice her. But she could always feel it coming nearer and nearer, its shadow growing bigger and bigger, until eventually, in sheer terror, she would leap up and try to run away.

  In her dreams, she never managed to move one step. But her legs would always start to thrash around the bed.

  ‘Wake up, Mary,’ one of the other girls would complain, prodding her with their sharp elbows. ‘You’re having one of your dreams again.’

  They would tell her to lie still, and she would, clutching the sheets to her chin, staring up at the ceiling, terrified to close her eyes lest the dream stalked her again.

  She sighed, rubbing the heels of her hands against her eyes. Deep down she knew that shadows did not turn into men, and chase girls down the street.

  Though it had not stopped her running from him.

  Just as she fled from whatever it was that stalked her dreams.

  ‘Mary!’The angry voice of her employer made every girl in the workroom jump to attention. The fact that Madame Pichot had left her office at this hour of the morning did not bode well for any of them.

  ‘What is the matter with you now? You are as white as a sheet! You are not going to be ill again, are you?’

  Mary could not blame her for looking so exasperated. She was nowhere near as robust as the other girls who sewed for Madame. Never had
been.

  ‘That doctor promised me that if you took regular walks, your constitution would improve,’Madame complained. ‘I cannot afford for you to take to your bed at this time of year!’Although the workload had slackened off slightly, now that the presentations in the Queen’s drawing rooms had mostly taken place, there were still enough orders coming in for Madame to keep her girls working from dawn till they dropped into bed from sheer exhaustion.

  Madame Pichot stalked across the bare floor and laid her hand on Mary’s forehead.

  ‘I am n-not ill,’ Mary stammered, as much alarmed now by Madame’s censure, as by what had happened in the street. ‘B-but there w-was a m-man…’

  Madame Pichot rolled her eyes, raising her hands to the ceiling in one of her Gallic expressions of exasperation. ‘The streets are always full of men. I am sure none of them would be interested in a little dab of nothing like you!’ she snapped, tugging off Mary’s gloves, and untying her bonnet ribbons.

  ‘N-no, he was shouting,’ Mary exclaimed, recalling that fact for the first time herself.

  ‘There are a lot of men hawking their wares at this time of the morning,’ Madame scoffed. ‘He wasn’t shouting at you.’

  ‘But I think he was,’ she murmured, trying to examine what had happened without letting the panic that had gripped her on the street from clouding her perception. ‘He chased me!’ Though why some man she had never seen before should suddenly take it into his head to pursue her, shouting angrily, she could not imagine. But she had definitely seen him roughly pushing a tradesman out of his way. With his vengeful, dark eyes fixed on her. And for one awful moment, it had felt as though the curtain that separated what was real, from what existed only in her head, had been ripped in two. She had not known where she was. Or who she was.

  That had been the most frightening moment of all.

  ‘Mary, really,’ Madame said, tugging her to her feet, and undoing her coat buttons, while the other girls in the workroom began to snigger, ‘just because you saw a man running in the street, does not mean he was chasing you. Who on earth would want to chase a scrawny little creature like you, when there are willing, pretty girls for sale on every street corner?’