Page 2 of My Lady Melisende (Ladies Least Likely #6)

CHAPTER ONE

LONDON, MAY 1782

“ T hat one? Completely unsuitable. A match there is not to be considered.” Lady Cranbury delivered this proclamation with the confidence that it would be taken, as were most of her proclamations, as little less than gospel handed down from London’s haut ton for the illumination of lesser beings.

“But if her father’s a duke—?” This demurral came from the hostess of the evening’s event, Lady Maplethorne, a mere knight’s wife and one of those lesser beings who depended on guidance from the Lady Cranburys of the world.

“A diplomat living on the mercy of his king. Or our king. Someone’s king. Utter leeches, these men are. Call themselves ambassadors. Gamble the fate of nations at dice. And let their daughters roam free completely without restraint, and most shabby manners, I must say.”

“Oh, dear. Perhaps I ought not have encouraged Harry to dance with her.”

“She told the Duchess of Highcastle at a Venetian breakfast that the peasants in Nyon wrapped their headscarves just as the duchess wore her turban. The duchess went into fits. Turns out her dresser is not a French woman, as she claimed, but a dairy farmer’s daughter from some Swiss valley.”

“That is a faux pas , but not a crime,” Lady Maplethorne ventured.

“The chit was hosting the breakfast. Another of those events for her father to curry favor from the new Privy Council, now that Rockingham is in power.”

Lady Cranbury sniffed, serene in the confidence that, as a woman who had had the marvelous good sense to marry into a family holding extensive lands and wealth, and the distinction that naturally followed upon such possessions, she would always be among those who created governments and whose favor governments sought.

As opposed to holders of foreign titles of dubious merit, who were reduced to buying favors and pleading influence from the power brokers of the world in order to secure their family seats which, for they all might claim were of centuries-old provenance, were still not on the Grand Tour and so could be safely assumed to reside in the provincial backwaters of the Continent.

Melisende put a hand over her mouth to keep from snorting as she glided behind the huddle of society mavens watching the dancing in Lady Maplethorne’s drawing room. They were ravens, not mavens, talons out and beaks at the ready. Their pronouncements on her were no surprise; most of them would take the liberty to say such things to her face, hoping to improve her with the knowledge and check her foreign pride.

Above the hand clamping back the impulse to inform Lady Maplethorne that her father was in actuality a grand duke, Melisende met the merry gaze of her companion.

“A good thing we didn’t stay for a second set,” he whispered. “My doting mama might have felt compelled to prise me from your grip.”

Melisende let show a smile, wondering what Lady Maplethorne would say if she knew her darling Harry—a lesser son, but still—was, at this very moment, conducting Melisende to the library for what could only look like a forbidden tryst to the Lady Cranburys of the world.

“How would she feel to know I have already drawn you into my cunning snares?” she whispered back. “Requesting a peek into your father’s library, when any other girl would ask you to fetch her lemonade and take her for a turn about the hall to admire the art. Full evidence of my unsuitability.”

“Unsuitability, my lady Melisende, is not what most people remark of you.”

Harry took her hand in caution as he surveyed the traffic of ladies going in and out of the retiring room, promenading with their chosen gentlemen around the spacious vestibule with its gallery of artifacts, or joining card tables in the smaller saloon that lay across from the grand parlor with the dancing. It was not necessary to guard her; Melisende was taking care not to be noticed disappearing down the stairs with a man. When the coast was as clear as could be with a house full of guests, she allowed him to conduct her to the library, tucked opposite the reception room on the ground floor. But once she had achieved her prize, she drew her hand away.

“Here is the atlas the pater bought at auction.” Harry pointed. “Terribly plumped with himself for outbidding Payne.”

“Remarkable detail.” The book had been laid out for display, which, Melisende knew, was unwise. The vellum pages would swell and crimp over time, ruining the detailed illustrations.

She found the County of Tyrol, easy to identify for the trail of little shaded triangles, poor representation for the magnificent mountains that formed the backdrop of her childhood. She looked, but saw no outline for the duchy of Merania. As if the enchanted place with its villages and castle nestled into the great slope of a mountain had never existed. As if her usurping uncle had simply wiped her homeland off the map.

She glanced around the library. A fire burned low in the fireplace, and a pair of candelabra perched upon the mantelpiece. The room had been prepared for someone to glance into and perceive further proof of the Maplethorne wealth and taste, but it had not been arranged to receive readers hiding from the rest of the soiree.

Nor spies hunting like a thief in the night for Sir Ephraim’s latest acquisitions. Melisende moved to the mantel and lit the candelabra. Harry’s sire had won more than just this atlas at that auction.

“Do you know, I suddenly feel fatigued. I believe that last dance took the wind out of my sails. You wouldn’t think it terrible to abandon me here a moment? The retiring room will be quite busy, and this is a rather restful place.”

She sank into a mahogany armchair and gave Harry what she hoped was a wan look. Melisende was not accustomed to feeling anything less than vigorous, so she wasn’t sure she had achieved the proper expression.

Harry sat on the edge of the desk beside her. “I’ll wait with you.”

Drat. She chewed on her lip. How to get rid of her escort, now he posed an obstacle to her search?

“Perhaps you ought to please Mama and hurry back to dance with a lovely, eligible girl. We wouldn’t wish to put her ladyship in a fret.”

Harry looked around. “It’s Algie’s part to play the good boy, and my lot to fret her. Responsibility of the spare and all. Do you know, it is awfully restful in here. Hadn’t noticed.” His gaze landed back on Melisende, and he lifted his brows. “Nice quiet spot for an interlude.”

Double drat. There must be none of that if she meant to shake him. Melisende rose, flicking out the skirts of her robe. Best not to sit anyway and risk creasing the silk.

If he meant to linger, she’d make use of him. It was imperative she locate the book.

“What other treasures does your father’s library hold, I wonder?” It might not matter if he saw the tome in her hand, anyway; it wasn’t as if he’d be able to read it.

Harry scooted closer, his gaze warming. “I can think of a few things a sight more interesting than moth-eaten old books.”

She considering informing him that moths did not eat the leather of bindings of books, but mold and booklice might. How much damage had the volume sustained? She’d found them all so far in varying states of disrepair, some with locks broken, some with foxing along the edges of the parchment. One with a bookworm that had, by the grace of God, only gnawed its larval paths through the margins. The damage was not surprising for tomes that were centuries old and had sustained many vicissitudes of fortune. The greater surprise was that they’d endured this long at all.

But the auction catalogue said this book had been in fair condition. It would be legible. It would reveal the secret. She simply had to find it.

She had to find them all. If even one volume was missing or destroyed, her pursuit was futile. Her lifelong dream, and the family legend, would disappear into the smoke of invasion that had covered Merania all those years ago.

Leaving her with nothing. There would be nothing left for her after failure but the awful, looming fact that, without a past, she had no future.

Melisende took a chamberstick from the mantelpiece, a heavy solid shelf of Italian marble. “You wouldn’t rather be dancing? I hear an allemande starting . Earl Payne’s daughter is just out, and she seems a taking thing.”

Harry’s eyes moved appreciatively over Melisende’s open robe of brocaded satin with its cascading hand-painted poppies. The cream silk stomacher and petticoat added a demure contrast to the luscious robe, a puzzling blend of the decadently sensual and the elegantly restrained, which Melisende had made her signature.

“I’ll wait. Payne’s girl is so young she’s green, and you’re the best dancer in those rooms anyway. Lady Bellwether kept stepping on my foot, when you’d suppose she would have had only the best dancing master.”

“She’s never been to Vienna,” Melisende murmured, carrying her candle to the shelf of books tucked into the corner of the room. “That is where I learned to dance.”

The shelves, following the dictates of fashion and not practicality, rose to the high ceiling, outside the halo of the flickering light. A litany of drats. If she was foiled in her mission tonight she would have to find an excuse for Harry to bring her here in the daylight, and daylight library forays were more difficult for subterfuge, she knew that from experience.

She was growing desperate if she were considering involving Harry in her search. She had to find the book, but she couldn’t afford to let anyone else know when she’d found it.

For she had an enemy—a rival in her search—and he was out there, somewhere.

Not Harry, of course. He was the most adorable macaroon, better than a wooden soldier for letting her manipulate him. Melisende had learned early, in her first forays into court, the benefit of having a coterie of eager young men to do her bidding. She had cultivated one out of habit upon coming to Britain, and it was proving enormously useful to have her own private network of escorts, informants, and hangers-on. Her Habsburg grandmother would have been proud.

Harry watched her as if she were a badger come out of her burrow, a small, feral animal he’d never observed before. “I thought you came from France.”

“My father and I lived in Lyon for a time.” And Geneva, and Vienna, and Pozsony, and Prague, and there was that summer in St. Petersburg. Melisende sighed.

How she’d loved St. Petersburg, feeling the stones of imperial ambitions rise beneath her feet. She’d loved Dresden too, with its art and culture, remaking itself after the Seven Years’ War. Varna had been lovely one winter, overlooking the water, and Barcelona too, with its Catalan cookery, the smell of cargols grilled by the vendor on the street below drifting through her open window, the air flavored with the salt of the sea.

“You are a very interesting woman, Melisende of Merania. And heir to a duchy, it would seem.”

“A grand duchy,” Melisende murmured, moving to the next shelf of books. None of the spines resembled the book she sought, with the thick threads of the binding standing out beneath the pressed leather, the rust-red color of an old bloodstain.

“But I am not the heir,” she added. “Merania is currently in possession of my uncle Emmerich, and he wants me to marry my cousin Rudolf to put to rest my father’s complaints about stealing our land.”

“So that is why.” Harry stood.

“Why what?” She glanced his way, finger on the spine of a book of sermons with the imprint of the Aldine Press. Right printer, wrong book.

He moved toward her. He was no taller than she; Melisende could look most men of her acquaintance in the eye. A whiff of the candle wax reached her nose, sweet beeswax, for candles in an unused room. Lavish of Lady Maplethorne. Melisende would have saved the dearer beeswax for the populated rooms, but then, living in exile forced one to be thrifty.

“That is why you allow no one to court you. Because you are already engaged to be married.”

“Mmm.” Let that suffice for a reason.

The true explanation, that English men did not interest her, would only pique him, and then it would be more difficult to tease him into inviting her to his home on another day if her mission failed tonight. Harry was a boy, barely out of university, with the rub of polish from his Grand Tour and the suits of a gentleman freshly applied. He spent his days riding and driving and dining with his friends, and his evenings dancing and drinking and carousing with his friends, which left him very little of interest to talk about.

Melisende raised her eyebrows. “Do tell,” she said, recalling his earlier remark. “What color does a girl turn when she is no longer green?”

“Fair as a rose. Like you, Melisende.” He stalked closer. “So fascinating. Foreign. Exotic.”

“Oh.” This was unfortunate. He had been about to prove so useful. Now he was going to attempt to make love to her here in his father’s study while she had work to do, making a pest of himself in the process.

She held the chamberstick away from her body so he could not come close enough to tread on her skirts. Pity that boys, around a woman, could only ever think of one purpose for them. That was why men were more interesting; they could usually come up with at least two.

“Perhaps it is because you are Austrian.”

“Perhaps,” she said coolly, turning her attention back to the books. She wasn’t Austrian, but it would be too tedious to try to explain. She was also not a fair English rose, with her skin the color of milky tea, and her hair—the less said about that the better.

“You, Devlin, are enchanting.” A feminine giggle punctuated the words, then a breathless gasp. “Absolutely— ah! —enchanting.”

Melisende and Harry turned together to observe who had tumbled into the library behind them. It was, on a stroke of marvelous good fortune, Harry’s younger sister, out in her first season. She was sweet as a buttercup in a robe à l’anglaise of yellow silk, her cheeks pink and flushed as she nestled, shockingly, in the arm her companion had thrown about her. Melisende focused on the gentleman and barely contained a shriek of fury.

Of course it would be him, barging in on her in this unaccountably rude fashion, throwing all her carefully laid plans, her weeks of calculation, into the air like so many seeds. Of course.

Harry’s jaw went hard, the boyishness disappearing before her eyes. His gaze skewered his sister, but he addressed her escort. “Devlin? Explain this.”

The intruder gave his host a lazy grin, a hint of wickedness in it. “Flory’s a bit wrung out from all the figures. Fancied a sit down.”

“The library is no place for a rest. Or an interlude,” Harry said, suddenly the stern chaperone. “Florence, take yourself to the retiring room and have someone fix your frock. Your neckline’s doing a London Bridge.”

This brought every eye to Florence’s décolletage, where her young breasts rose above her tight bodice like two damson fruit about to spill from a basket. She giggled again.

“Don’t mind Harry. He’s only cross because Princess Melisende won’t let him kiss her slipper.”

“ Lady Melisende,” Harry said, outraged, “is looking for a book.”

Devlin appeared to brighten at this. “Is she now? Fine things, books.” His eyes, the ice blue of the Baltic Sea, swung to Melisende. “Would fancy you the educated sort,” he said, speech slightly slurred. “You look it.”

“Do I?” Melisende said freezingly. “I wouldn’t have guessed you acquainted with the signs of intelligence, since you so fail to display any sign of possessing your own.”

Philip Devlin wasn’t a Harry who gamboled around town getting up to puppyish larks. He was a dedicated and concentrated scoundrel. He wasted his days, it was said, raking from club to coffeehouse to the bed of his latest mistress, and he spent his nights gambling, drinking, and pursuing the woman he meant for his next mistress, having already tired of the one earlier that day. If there was a modern-day successor to the Hellfire clubs, Devlin was no doubt its architect.

And he was turning up everywhere these days, every time Melisende was about to make a discovery.

“Oh, you cat!” Florence cried. She threw off Devlin’s arm and stomped her foot. “Just because you have no better than my brother on your string, and Devlin would never look twice at you .”

“Thanks be to Aphrodite and all her Cupids,” Melisende said silkily. “Will you take him away, Miss Maplethorne? He’s drunk.”

“Not a bit top-heavy,” Devlin slurred. “Not even touched.”

Giving a lie to Florence’s declaration, he was in fact regarding Melisende quite intently. The top of her chest prickled, the way it did when she tasted cranberry jam. Melisende loved cranberry jam.

“You reek of brandy. I can smell it from here.” Perhaps she should say no more to disclose her acquaintance with distilled spirits. English girls drank nothing stronger than ratafia, which was far less potent. “The library is occupied, and the dancing is about to begin again. Good evening.”

Devlin sat heavily in the chair Melisende had recently vacated. There was something vaguely indecent about his posture, though she couldn’t say what. His suit was impeccable, a dove gray superfine with dark embroidery along the cuffs and hem, matching waistcoat, breeches buckled above the knee. His buttons were no more than bronze, she would guess, but the ruffles of his neckcloth and his sleeve hinted at a man who enjoyed the sensual pleasures. White silk stockings hugged his calves as he propped one ankle on his knee, showing a set of polished black pumps. He seemed to fill the chair, somehow, though it was not a tiny stick of furniture.

“P’raps I am a trifle disguised,” Devlin said, giving Florence a woeful look. She huffed.

“Harry, you must take your sister away. She can’t be seen with him,” Melisende said.

“I’ll say.” Harry bristled, then turned to Melisende, obviously reluctant to leave her. “Aren’t you coming? The allemande and all.”

“I’ll blow out the candles.” She fixed a stern gaze on Devlin, commanding him with her eyes. Begone .

He leaned his head against the back of the chair and eyeballed the ceiling. Above the ruffle of his neckcloth his throat was strong and firm. Melisende looked away.

“Devlin, don’t let them,” Florence cried.

Devlin cocked his head and squinted one blue eye at her. “Now, Felicity. Be a good girl and go with big brother. Give a man a moment to recover.”

Harry muttered beneath his breath, overruled by Florence’s shriek. “Oh, you oaf!” She flounced from the room, the ruffles on the back of her skirts shaking in her indignation.

Melisende surveyed the new interloper, assessing his ability to inconvenience her. Devlin was the lesser son of some baronet, she believed. An Irish estate, not an English one, which ranked the family as inferior in the British scale of things. There were some half a dozen other sons in between him and the title, all of them stronger credits to the family name. He’d put in the requisite time spent at school, which in England were apparently holding pens for the sons of the noble and gentle classes, there to contain their mischief until they were of age suitable to be unleashed on the world, where their mischief expanded to imbibing and touching up knight’s daughters during their mother’s soirees before progressing to the card room to gamble away fortunes they didn’t have.

Devlin was no bigger threat to her than a midge, irritating and to be avoided. Melisende returned to the shelves before her. She had no longer than a single set to locate and decode the book, then Harry would come looking for her, pestering for her attention.

“You’re a cat, and I’m an oaf,” he said. Devlin’s voice sounded deep and steady, surprising her. “Does that make us a pair?”

She glanced back at the chair, and the disheveled roué was gone. He sat like a king on his throne, regarding a subject whose worth to him he was calculating.

The prickle moved across her shoulders and down her arms.

“You might go away now,” she informed him.

He stood, and there wasn’t a trace of the drunken sot to him. He rose like a waterfall of majestic gray silk. He rose like a giant from the hillside, breaking his chains.

“Not until I know if you’ve found it,” he said. “That book you’re looking for.”