Page 5 of Lady Like
Longley Manor is two hours’ ride from London, and when Harry and Collin climb off their mounts, they’re both stiff, though Harry found the ride a joy on Alexander’s loaned racehorse.
The stallion is registered as Matthew Mark Luke and John and he cuts a dramatic figure with his dark coat and mane so blond as to be almost white.
When she had gone to collect him, Alexander’s groom had warned Harry that the horse was a keen jumper, but Harry had been unprepared for just how fearless he was in his approach to stiles and ditches and fallen logs.
She nearly lost Collin twice when Matthew happily vaulted streams that Collin’s mount refused to cross.
As they wait for grooms to collect the horses, Collin stretches his calves with one hand on the saddle while Harry stares up at the manor’s columned facade.
She has seen a number of grand houses in her day—often under the cover of darkness and only via a bedroom window that dropped, if she was lucky, into a hedge—but, in a contest of stateliness, Longley would soundly trounce them all.
The size alone speaks to the sort of wealth that only those born into it ever manage to find ordinary.
The facade is sand-colored stone lined with Corinthian pilasters and wide windows that must cast light into every corner of every room at every hour of the day.
Onion-dome turrets stud the top, and Harry loses count of the chimneys at fifteen.
“Well,” Harry remarks. “Not a bad place to be murdered, I suppose. Who do you think owns it?”
“Whoever it is, they don’t seem to be in residence.
” Collin points to one of the upper-story windows, where the panes have been punched out.
Only then does Harry notice a bird’s nest swaddled in the crook of one of the cornices, and runoff from a damaged drainpipe on the roof that has left a dark streak of mineral deposit on the stone.
Something butts Harry’s knees from behind, and she turns to find a gray mastiff with so many folds to its skin that it looks like puddled silk.
It sniffs her proffered hand, then leans against her leg, and Harry scratches the dog behind its ears.
“Someone’s been feeding this chap,” she remarks, palming the dog on its belly, which thumps hollowly like a melon tested for ripeness.
“Perhaps he’s been feasting on the bones of other Londoners lured through the gate,” Collin says, eyeing the dog warily. The dog shakes, spattering them both with ribbons of saliva.
Harry claps a hand on Collin’s shoulder. “You see to the horses. I’m going to knock.”
“What?” Collin calls after her. “Alone?”
“He’ll protect me.” Harry holds out a hand to the mastiff, which follows her up the stairs to the entrance like a witch’s familiar.
It isn’t until Harry and the dog reach the top of the long staircase that she notices the door is not only unlatched but already ajar.
A prickle of apprehension crawls up her back.
Collin’s instinct for caution suddenly feels like it might have been a wiser inclination.
She had mostly been thinking of how caution clashed with her outfit.
“Once more unto the breach, dear friend?” Harry asks the dog. He stares at her, unstudied in Shakespeare, but follows when she pushes open the door.
The house’s entryway is paneled in dark wood, chipped and splintered, though a few spots still shine with expensive lacquer.
A stone stairway splits and crawls upward to a second-story landing rimmed by an ornate balustrade, like might be found in a theater to mark the path to the most expensive boxes.
A gold chandelier hangs from the ceiling, and above it, a mural of chubby cherubs frolicking amid petal-pink clouds, while nymphs play lyres and eat grapes and enjoy mythological leisure, decorates the dome.
The paint has started to peel, so the faces skew more skeletal than divine.
Dust collects in the corners of the foyer, crisp leaves and dead beetles tangled in the clods.
Harry steps cautiously inside, the heels of her boots clicking against the flagstones. She rests a hand on the banister and looks up at the high windows, from which sunlight spills across the dark floor in liquid panels.
“It’s a beautiful house, don’t you agree?”
Harry whirls and claps a hand to her heart. “Son of a bitch.” The dog, which had nearly completed the sixty-five circles needed to lie down comfortably, leaps to its feet and barks once.
A man is leaning against the doorframe off the entryway.
He’s nearly as tall as Harry, who towers over most, though the height of his raffia top hat works in his favor.
His dark hair has gone mostly gray and his cheeks are round and red, the complexion of a man to whom port is always available.
His simple linen suit feels both too plain and too clean for the dusty surroundings.
“Thirty-five major rooms on the ground floor,” the man says, as though he hasn’t just manifested like a spirit with a complete account of the property statistics.
“Seven hundred and twenty-five acres. It was built in 1592 by courtiers as a prodigy house to serve Queen Elizabeth when she traveled her realm. What do you think?”
“It’s certainly excessive.” Harry hooks her hands in the pockets of her frock coat, squinting at the man. “Is it yours?”
The man chuckles, and Harry thinks that no sound is more frustrating than a gentleman chuckling enigmatically instead of explaining himself. “I suppose so.”
“Well felicitations, you’ve a lovely home.”
“It could be yours, Miss Lockhart.”
The sound of her name cracks the air between them like a whip. Harry frowns. “Who are you exactly?”
The man’s smile goes maddeningly broader. “You don’t recognize me?”
“Should I?” In her experience, most men possess an overinflated sense of their own remarkableness.
Though the slope of his eyebrows and narrow nose niggle at something inside her, she cannot place where she might have seen him before.
He’s a handsome man, though age has softened his features like a vegetable left too long on the vine, and he’s more of a paunch than his doctor likely finds advisable in a man his age. “We didn’t shag, did we?”
“My name is George,” says George.
“Half the men in England are called George, and the other half are Edward,” Harry replies. “God save the king, and all that. What’s your family name?”
“Ah.” The man considers this, and Harry wonders what kind of imbecile has to give such a simple question this much thought. “I suppose,” he says after a moment, “it would be Hanover.” He doffs his hat and repeats, “God save the king, and all that.”
Good lord.
It’s no wonder he looks familiar. She’s seen a portrait of a face remarkably like his in every government building and Anglican church and public house and library and post office and upon every sixpence coin she has ever pulled from her pocket.
This man is George IV, Prince of Wales, Earl of Chester, Prince Regent in his father’s incapacity and recent ascendent to the throne, soon to be crowned the goddamn king of England.
And— Christ on toast!— she asked him if they’d shagged.
Harry fumbles into something like a curtsy, though having no skirt, instead takes the tails of her coat and holds them out at an angle their tailor never intended. She hears something rip.
The prince takes a quick step forward, extending a hand to her. “Please, Miss Lockhart, you need not bow to me here.”
“I rather think I do, Your Highness,” Harry says, eyes determinedly fixed on her boots. “The rules about showing proper respect to a king are not dependent on geography.”
“I am not the king.”
“I hear there’s going to be a party soon that will change that.”
“I beg you not to think of me as such,” he says, his voice pinching. “Think of me instead as your father.”
“Am I meant to take that figuratively,” Harry asks. “In the way that as king you will be father of the whole nation?”
“Miss Lockhart.”
Harry raises her head. The prince still has a hand extended, like he’s asking her to dance.
And suddenly, she knows the real reason his face is familiar.
It’s Collin’s face. It’s her face. The thick eyebrows and patrician nose that could never be attributed to their broad-featured mother.
The dark hair, salting in the same patches as Collin’s.
Her own thin lips that had always felt like a rebuke to her matrilineal line’s full mouths, smiling at her from the face of the Prince of Wales.
His eyes squint when he smiles too, just as hers do.
“If you’d come sit with me,” the prince says, “we have much to discuss and I’m afraid I haven’t much time. I was expecting you earlier.”
“Should I fetch my brother?” Harry asks. “It will save you time if we can react simultaneously.”
“Let’s you and I talk alone first,” the prince says as he turns for the parlor. “Surely he knows that, were there real danger, your hound would give chase.”
The answer doesn’t bode well for her fate as the favored twin in whatever drama she’s sure is unfolding, yet Harry follows, dropping the tails of her coat, but remaining in a low crouch, like she’s under fire.
The dog watches her go, and when its eyes meet hers, Harry beckons it fiercely.
The mastiff may look like a drawer of ribbons, but he is a kind of second, should she need one, and Harry has been in enough fights to know the value of reinforcements, even ones of questionable merit.
But the dog merely eyes her extended hand, then drops its head back onto its paws.