20

Marcus strode up St. James's toward Curzon Street. It was a dark night but he'd have been unaware of his surroundings even in brightest moonlight. His mind was a seething witches' brew of anger, disappointment, and something that he vaguely recognized as sorrow. Sorrow for the savage, abrupt destruction of his budding belief that his marriage, founded on quicksand, could be reconstructed, grounded now in cement. He had begun to lay down the burden of mistrust, gradually to allow the warmth of his feelings for Judith to overcome the doubts, to be seduced by her in every respect as thoroughly as he'd been seduced simply by her body in Brussels. And now it was all gone, ashes on his tongue. She wanted what he could give her materially, and when he didn't satisfy those wants, she gave not a thought to his position, to her position, but simply took what she wanted, perpetrating her deceitful masquerade as shamelessly as ever. She had no interest in or intention of being his wife in the fullest sense, adapting her life-style to the obligations and duties of that position even as she enjoyed its advantages. She was using him, as she had used him from the start.

At the corner of Duke Street and Piccadilly, the sounds of uproar broke through his self-absorption. A group of young bloods of about Charlie's age were drunkenly weaving their way along the pavement, arm in arm, nourishing bottles of burgundy. One of them fired a flintlock pistol in the air, and their raucous hilarity brought an officer of the watch out of an alley, his lantern raised high, throwing a yellow circle of illumination over the disheveled band. It was an error. With a fox hunter's "view halloo," the group surged forward, surrounding the man, clearly intent on one of the favorite pastimes of inebriated, aristocratic youth: boxing the watch.

Marcus's anger, already in full flame, needed only this to create a conflagration. He strode into the middle of the group, wielding his cane to good purpose, until he reached the fallen watchman. One of the young men, his face red, his eyes bloodshot, swung an empty burgundy bottle at the cane-wielding spoiler of their fun. Slender fingers gripped his wrist and the pressure made the young man wince. The marquis stared at him in silence. His grip tightened and, with a sharply indrawn breath, the young man let the bottle crash to the pavement. He fell back under the piercing menace of those ebony eyes and his companions, infected by the unspoken threat embodied in this new arrival, melted away.

The officer of the watch scrambled up, retrieving his fallen lantern, straightening his coat, adjusting his wig that had slipped over one eye. He muttered about taking the young hooligans before the Justice, but the group had gone, and soon could be heard hooting and bellowing from the safety of a reasonable distance.

"Ruffians," Marcus stated disgustedly, kicking broken glass away from his gleaming Hessians. "Too much money and time and not enough to occupy them. Sometimes I think it would have been better if we hadn't beaten Bonaparte. A few years in the army would do them the world of good." The watchman agreed, but rather nervously. His rescuer seemed to be in as dangerous a mood as his assailants, judging by those intimidating eyes and the savage way his cane had thwacked across their shoulders. He ducked his head, mumbled his thanks, and took himself off on his rounds again, swinging his lantern.

The encounter had done nothing to quell the bright flame of rage as Marcus strode up the steps of the Herons' mansion on Curzon Street. Light poured from the windows, voices and the strains of dance music greeted him as he stepped into the hall. Instructing the butler curtly to summon Lady Carrington's chaise, Marcus strode up the stairs.

His hostess came fluttering over to him, all smiles, and Marcus forced himself to respond with due courtesy, but it was clear to Amanda Heron that the Most Honorable Marquis of Carrington's thoughts were elsewhere… and they weren't very pleasant thoughts, judging by the look in his eye. She was quite relieved when he excused himself and made straight for the card room, casting a quick glance into the drawing room, where the rug had been rolled up and a few couples still danced to the strains of a pianoforte.

Judith was not dancing. Neither was she in the main card room. Presumably the stakes at this insipid affair were not worthy of her skill, he thought savagely, turning aside to another, smaller salon.

He heard Judith's laughing voice as he stepped through the arched doorway. "For shame, Sally, you're looed. How could you have lost that trick?"

"Oh, it grows late," Sally protested. "And I haven't your powers of concentration, Judith."

The powers necessary to maintain a deceitful masquerade. Marcus stood for a minute in the shadow of a heavy curtain. Ten people sat in a cheerful circle around the loo table. They were playing limited loo, the penalty fixed at a shilling, but Judith had beside her a substantial pile of shillings, and as he watched, a man opposite pushed the pool across the table.

"Lady Carrington, you win again."

"How very surprising," Marcus murmured, crossing to the table.

Judith experienced a start of pleasure at the sound of his voice, and missed the tone at first. She turned, smiling, as he came up behind her shoulder. The smile faded as she saw his expression, a slowly creeping apprehension prickling between her shoulder blades. "Carrington, I wasn't expecting you."

"Isn't this rather tame sport for you, my dear?" he asked, gesturing to the cards and the mound of small coins. His voice was heavy with sarcasm, and the rage that he could barely contain flared in his eyes.

Two spots of color pricked her cheekbones and her scalp contracted as apprehension became absolute. She became aware of the uneasy shirtings around the table, the puzzled glances at Lord Carrington. "I've always liked party games," she offered, desperately trying to defuse whatever this was. "We've been enjoying ourselves famously." She appealed to the table at large.

"Oh, famously," Isobel agreed readily, gathering up

her cards, her eyes warm and encouraging as she smiled at Judith. "Won't you join us, Lord Carrington?"

He shook his head with brusque discourtesy. "I wait only for my wife to make her excuses."

Only immediate compliance would end this mortification. Judith's head pounded as she pushed back her chair, picking up her reticule.

"You've forgotten your winnings," her husband said pointedly.

"They can go back in the pool." Judith thrust the shiny mound of coins into the middle of the table. Bidding her companions good night, she tried to smile as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening, but she could feel the stiffness of her lips and read in every eye both discomfort and consternation.

"Such winnings are too insignificant to be worth keeping, I assume," Marcus muttered against her ear as he drew her arm through his. Judith stiffened and would have withdrawn her arm, except that he tightened his grip, squeezing the limb against his body, so that to pull free would look like a struggle.

She couldn't think of anything that could safely be said in public, so she painted the stiff smile on her lips as they progressed through the rooms, bowed, made her farewells like a marionette obeying the puppeteer, and allowed herself to be removed in short order from the Herons' mansion and handed into the chaise, waiting ready at the door.

"What is all this about, Marcus?" To her annoyance, her voice shook, and she tried to deny that it was as much fear that produced die quaver as her own anger at the embarrassment he'd caused her.

"We will not discuss it here," he declared with icy finality.

"But I demand-"

"You will demand nothing."

There was such ferocity, such purpose, investing the statement that Judith was silenced. She shrank into a corner of the carriage, trying desperately to marshall her forces, to look for some clue to whatever had happened… to whatever was about to happen. Something dreadful had occurred. But what?

The chaise drew up in Berkeley Square. The coachman let down the footstep. Marcus sprang down and assisted Judith to alight. In silence, they entered the house, and the night porter locked and bolted the door behind them, bidding them good night.

"We will deal with this in my book room." Marcus's hand closed over Judith's shoulder as she moved toward the staircase.

There would be no waiting servants there, she realized. No one to dismiss before he could unburden himself of whatever weight of rage lay on his shoulders. She moved away from his hand, in the first gesture of independence she had managed since this debacle had begun, and walked ahead of him down the passage to the square room at the back of the house.

"Now, perhaps you'll tell me what this is all about?" Her hands shook now as she drew off her long silk gloves, finger by finger, but her voice was once more steady.

The deep nighttime silence of the sleeping house enclosed them, and for a minute Marcus didn't reply. He tossed his cane and gloves onto the table and poured himself a glass of cognac, trying to master his fury. When he spoke, his voice was relatively calm and distant.

"I've been extraordinarily naive, I freely admit. For some inexplicable and doubtless foolish reason I had assumed that once you'd achieved your goal by this marriage, you'd see no need to pursue your career at the gaming tables."

So that was it. Her lips were bloodless as she said, "When you made it clear you resented paying my expenses, I saw no alternative to paying for them myself. I prefer to do that anyway. I don't care to be dependent on a whimsical generosity, my lord."

"At no point did I say I resented paying your expenses. I did however say that as your husband, I would control your expenditure. My fortune is not at your unlimited disposal, although I now understand that you'd expected it to be." Ice tipped every loaded, humiliating word.

Judith felt herself diminishing into a small, hot ball of shame under the power of his contempt, and she fought to hold on to herself, to the essence of her pride and her knowledge of how wrong he was. "I don't and never did expect unlimited access to your money," she denied in a low voice. "But as your wife, I assumed I would be granted the dignity of an appearance of freedom, instead of being reduced to the status of a poor relation, or a child in the schoolroom, begging for pin money."

"And so in retaliation you choose to take money from my friends, to supplement an allowance you consider meager?"

"I do not take money from your friends… I win it!" she cried. "And I win it because I have the greater skill."

"You win it because you're a gamester-an adventuress, and you'll never be anything else," he declared bitterly. "I thought… God help me… I thought we were finding some truth on which to stand. But there is only one truth, isn't there, Judith? You're a manipulator

and you will manipulate whoever comes your way, if they can be used to your advantage."

"No," she whispered, the cramping ache in her belly intensifying as her muscles clenched against the hateful words. She pressed her hands to her cheeks. "No, it's not like that."

"Oh, really?" His eyebrows lifted, black question marks in his dark face. "When did you decide that I would be the most useful recipient of your inestimable virtue, Judith? When you first saw me? Or did you decide later… even as late as when we were on the way to Quatre Bras, perhaps?"

"What are you saying?" Her eyes, huge with distress, stared at the mask of his face. "I don't understand what you're saying."

"Oh, then let me explain, my perverse and obtuse wife." He swung away from her, his fists clenched at his sides as he fought for control. He wanted to hurt her as she had hurt him, and he knew the potential power of the violence in his soul if he ever let slip the leash of control.

"When a virtuous woman loses her maidenhead dishonorably to an honorable man, she has a claim on that man. How difficult it must have been for you, reining in that passionate nature of yours, my dear, until your most precious bargaining chip found the highest bidder. Only the bidder didn't know what he was bidding for, did he? The bidder was offered the masquerade of an experienced adventuress, and only when it was too late did he discover the virgin."

Judith felt sick. Her body was one tightly clenched muscle and the nausea rose in her throat. This had never occurred to her. All this time, he believed she had deliberately led him on, offering the wiles of a wanton, in order to trap him with her virtue.