The Regency Redgraves: What an Earl Wants / What a Lady Needs / What a Gentleman Desires / What a Hero Dares

“No,” she answered honestly. “I doubt any of them deserve saving. Except Adam. He will grow up someday, won’t he?”

“I’d hoped to send him off to school and forget about him until he reached his majority. But I suppose I could take him in hand, if we are to assume the Society might soon show an interest in him. Would I be rewarded? I can think of several ways you could accomplish that.”

“I’ll have Doreen make you a large bowl of fish chowder,” Jessica said as the front door of the mansion opened and a worried-looking older man in butler’s black stuck his head into the breach.

“Excuse me, my lord, but her ladyship says you and the young miss are to come or go, but don’t just stand out here with your fingers in your mouth or else people will wonder if your brain cracked. Sir.”

“She said all that, did she, Soames? In just that way?” Gideon asked, extending his arm to Jessica, who saw no recourse now but to take it. His grandmother had been looking down at them from one of the windows? How embarrassing!

“She may have said a few more words I chose to either alter or discard rather than repeat them in front of the young miss, my lord, but I believe you can imagine them.”

“Yes,” Gideon said, handing over his hat and gloves to a liveried footman while Soames relieved Jessica of her shawl. “I believe I can. We’ll find our own way upstairs.”

“She’s a tartar?” Jessica whispered the question as they mounted the wide, curving staircase, covertly examining the life-size marble statues set in niches along the wall. They were all male and curiously devoid of fig leaves.

“Hard and strict and abrasive? Hardly. She’s sweetness itself, and her conversation is delightful. It’s only when you go to move that you realize you’ve been sliced into ribbons. Give as good as you get, Jessica. She likes that.”

“It would appear she likes others things, as well. Those statues are all naked,” she mumbled as they gained the landing and another wide foyer. “Everything is so opulent, so beautiful, it took me a moment to believe I was seeing what I saw.”

“Trixie has a curious notion of humor and never ordered them removed after my grandfather died. Imagine the ton, cooling their heels for a good half hour as they stand cheek by jowl on the stairs, waiting to be announced for one of Trixie’s famous balls. The ladies never know where to look. The gentlemen vary in their reaction. Red ears. Quiet sniggers. Open admiration for some, which is rather disconcerting. It has been whispered that there’s also an extensive collection of interesting paintings, etchings, even playing cards and a fascinatingly explicit set of china. If it exists, we grandchildren have not been allowed to inspect the collection, although I imagine we will be forced to do so at some point when Trixie dies, which she is not planning to do.”

He didn’t sound ashamed but only amused. “I’ve heard you Redgraves referred to as scandalous. I thought the reference referred only to the circumstances around your father’s death. And whispers of his Society, of course. I had no idea—”

“No idea the taint goes beyond my father? It’s said we Redgraves descend from a long line of satyrs. Trixie is our grandfather’s third wife, the two others having died, the first in childbed, the second murdered by her lover. Trixie was barely sixteen when she was brought to the marriage bed by a man thirty years her senior. Truthfully, I think she was even younger than that. I once researched the subject and found the legal age for females to marry during that time was twelve.”

“I doubt she’d want anyone to think she’s four years older than assumed,” Jessica said, inwardly cringing at the thought of a twelve-year-old bride. “Although perhaps not.”

“It was another time, and definitely not a better one. In any case, my father merely resurrected what had been created by my grandfather years earlier. As I already told you, there were many such clubs back then. Most were tame imitations of Dashwood’s, but not all. Some were worse, both here and in Ireland, other places. If we want to know the truth about the Society and its secrets, we need to talk to Trixie, and with the gloves off. Hers, and yours.”

“We were never going to Richmond, were we?” Jessica asked, looking toward the closed double doors to what had to be the drawing room. A pair of small yellow pug dogs stood outside them with their heads turned hopefully toward Soames, who had followed up the stairs and now scooped up the dogs and carried them away.

“Not today, no. I know this will be embarrassing for you, and I apologize, Jessica, truly. But if you’re at all worried the Society is still active, and they’ll come after your brother at some point, we need to do this.”

“You forgot to remind me that my father was murdered,” Jessica said archly. “Or reiterate your own reasons.”

“I’m Adam’s guardian.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, let’s not go through that again, please. Let’s simply get this over with so that I don’t have to look at you anymore.”

“Not even tonight in Portman Square? Adam is eager to meet his sister at the dinner table.”

“You just made that up.”

His grin made her want to slap him. “True. But he’ll be there, if I have to tie him to the chair. I don’t always play fair, but I’m most always effective when I want something. Now come on,” he said, holding out his arm. “We stand out here any longer, Trixie will be forced to abandon her pose of lady-at-leisure and come hunting us.”

And it was a lady-at-leisure Jessica saw when they entered the blue-and-white drawing room, a large chamber filled with sunlight and enormous vases and bowls stuffed with fresh flowers.

The Dowager Countess of Saltwood reclined on an intricately carved white-and-gilt one-armed lounge, her dainty feet encased in silver slippers tucked up beside her, her slim body draped in a high-waisted lace-edged burgundy silk gown cut for a much younger woman, colored for a dowdy matron. The effect was startlingly effective.

Her hair, a wondrous curled mass of white-gold ringlets woven through with several narrow silver ribbons, teased at her forehead, caressed her slim neck, touched on her right shoulder. She was painted, definitely, but with a subtle hand, so that the color in her cheeks and on her smiling mouth seemed natural.

If this was Beatrix Redgrave at—at Jessica’s quick calculations—nearly seventy years of age, the Trixie of her youth must have been the most stunningly beautiful woman ever born.

Jessica immediately felt too tall, incredibly plain and decidedly gauche, as she imagined every woman ever in the same room with the dowager countess had felt from the time Trixie had reached her fifth birthday.

“Gideon, my pet!” the woman exclaimed now, her voice like the soft tinkling of delicate silver bells. She raised one small, heavily be-ringed hand for his kiss. “What dastardly thing have I done that merits me two visits from my eldest grandson in as many days? You must tell me, so that I can repeat the transgression again and again, as I see you far too seldom.”

She looked past Gideon to smile at Jessica, who immediately curtsied. “And who is this gorgeous creature? She puts me in mind of dearest Juliette Rècamier, whom I so enjoyed when we met in Coppet while I was visiting Madame de Staël. Coppet is in Switzerland, pet,” she said as an aside to Gideon. “Such a beauty that one is, if poor as a church mouse, dear thing, and married at fifteen to her own father, if rumor is to be believed. And then there’s that unfortunate business about her inability to enjoy—Ah, but that’s again, only rumor. Suffice it to say the woman has been painted time and time again as a virginal figure.”

If the dowager countess was hoping to put Jessica to the blush, she had badly misjudged her by appearance: in point of fact, the butter-yellow gown with its modest neckline and her total lack of jewelry, such as a “fairly impressive strand of pearls.”

Gideon quickly stepped in and made the introductions, so that Jessica found herself curtsying yet again before being invited to sit. Soames entered the room then, trailed by two maids who quickly arranged a magnificent tea tray on a low table in front of Jessica, who was then asked to pour.

A test, possibly? To see if this Jessica Linden woman who had shown up here unannounced with her grandson had any notion of how to properly serve tea? What a wicked woman!

“I would be delighted,” Jessica said, inching forward on her chair. “Your ladyship will, I’m convinced, forgo sugar. In favor of cream.”

“Teased one naughty puss to the other,” her ladyship said, nodding her head in acknowledgement of the hit while delivering one of her own. “All right, Gideon, we’ve no simpering miss here. Who is she?”

“Jessica’s the half sister of my new ward, Adam Collier. You remember him. You met last week in Bond Street.”

“The cork-brained popinjay?” Trixie looked at Jessica again. “Clearly his mother was the imbecile in that union, although I never put much store by Turner Collier’s ability to think much beyond his—No, don’t frown so, Gideon, I’ll be good.”

Jessica bit back a smile. The dowager countess was so petite, so beautiful, the very picture of a sweet and gracious lady. When she spoke as she did now, it was rather like the surprise one felt when a child uttered a naughty word. You really weren’t sure at first you’d heard correctly. A line from an old nursery rhyme flitted through Jessica’s head: And when she was good she was very, very good…and when she was bad…

Trixie’s expression took on the attitude of interested listener. “Now explain why this cheeky child is here. I’m not such a slow-top that I don’t realize it has something to do with what we discussed yesterday.”

It didn’t take long for Gideon to relate Jessica’s concerns that the Society might approach Adam to take his father’s place in the devil’s dozen, but the dowager countess quickly pooh-poohed any notion the Society was still active.

“I won’t say it ended with Barry’s death, not immediately, but it couldn’t have gone on for more than another year before straggling to a halt, or I would have known.”

“Your grandson is of the opinion you know everything, your ladyship, up to snuff on all suits, as it were,” Jessica said as she offered the woman a small plate of iced cakes. Gideon had warned she’d have to give in order to get, and she would do so now. “As I was promised as the guest of honor at one of their ceremonies five years ago, I can only conclude he’s incorrect, and you don’t know everything.” She raised her chin a fraction. “Or you’re lying.”

Trixie’s kohl-darkened eyes assessed Jessica again and then slid to her grandson. “Linden, you said?”

“Yes, James Linden. Jessica’s late husband.”

The dowager countess swung her feet to the floor and sat up, again skewering Jessica with a look. “Byblow of a baron who shall remain nameless, invested with all the myriad vices of his father and the cunning of his blowsy strumpet of a mother—perished of the clap, I believe, the pair of them, and the baron’s innocent wife, as well, poor thing. Jamie Linden. Now there’s a name I’d hoped never to hear again. Dead now? Wonderful. If you were smart, you buried him upside down, so he couldn’t dig himself out, but only closer to hell.”

“Actually, ma’am, we left him in the bed where he died, only careful to first empty his pockets,” Jessica said, feeling more vindicated for what she’d done then she’d ever had until this moment. “I have no idea what the innkeeper did with the body.”

“We? You said ‘we’? No, don’t answer that yet, we’ll get to it. Gideon, clear away this insipid tea and pour us all some wine. Begin at the beginning, Jessica, if you please.”

“I’d rather not if you don’t mind, ma’am.”

“I do mind, most especially that you insist upon calling me ma’am, as if I’ve one foot hovering over an open grave. Perhaps it would help if you called me Trixie, as I believe we’re going to be discussing things that could only be hindered by formality. Lord knows it would help me. Ma’am?” She gave a delicate shudder of her slim shoulders.

Jessica bowed her head, concentrating on her hands, folded in her lap. “Thank you…Trixie. But I’d still rather not.”