Secret Admirer, Page 3

  Indeed, George Lyle was one of the only men in the metropolis who seemed immune to CeCe’s charms, and she regarded him in about the same light as a leper. Which was why, when she came flying through the air at an unseemly pace, said “George, dear, you will save us, won’t you,” and threw herself into his arms, he and Tuesday simply stared at her, dumbstruck.

  Tuesday recovered first. “What is wrong, CeCe?” she asked in a voice of real concern.

  “Everything. There is a man. Outside. Prowling. I was not sure so I went outside and there are footprints, men’s footprints and—” she drew away from George and eyed him with suspicion. “Why aren’t you going out to capture him?”

  George’s former look of surprise had by this time changed into a sneer. He shook his head. “Haven’t you tired of that game yet, CeCe?” he asked, brushing at the front of his tunic as if close contact with her had left behind a dirty residue.

  “Game? It is not a game,” CeCe said, her cheeks pink. “Didn’t you hear me? There are footprints out there. There is someone out there. Waiting to rob us!”

  George’s sneer deepened. “You think all men are potential robbers, especially when I am trying to be alone with your mistress. Those footprints are probably mine, since you and your boyfriend Morse were too occupied, doing God knows what, to do your real jobs and open the front door for me.”

  “Morse is not my boyfriend. And my job is to wait on Tuesday, not man the door.”

  George waved her objection away. “You know you only pretend to see robbers because you are jealous of the attention Tuesday is paying me.”

  CeCe’s eyes narrowed. “Me? Jealous of you? If I did not know better I would have thought you’d already begun drinking rather than waiting until the afternoon.”

  “I do not get drunk in the afternoons,” George said stiffly, glancing fast in Tuesday’s direction.

  CeCe’s tone was light and informative. “That isn’t what Albert next door says. He says he’s seen you staggering around as early as noon.” Taking advantage of George’s momentary silence, CeCe turned her attention to Tuesday. “I swear, Tuesday, there was someone out there. Besides George. Last night, when I came back from helping Josie take in her new gown so it would show off her lovely wrists, I saw him just there.” She pointed directly across the street, to the mouth of a dark alley. “I tried to remind myself of what you said, of how no one would bother to rob us since we haven’t anything, but I just know he was watching us.” She hugged her arms around her slight figure, suddenly trembling again. “You believe me, don’t you Tuesday?”

  “Of course.”

  George snorted and, ignoring the glare Tuesday leveled at him, said to her, “I am telling you, princess, you have to leave here. Another day or two in this madhouse and you’ll be as insane as the rest of them.”

  “I’m not mad,” CeCe insisted with new vehemence. “There is someone out there. I can feel his eyes on us. On us right now.”

  At that moment there was a scratching noise above them. The three of them looked up. CeCe’s mouth formed a terrified O and her lips moved but no words came out. There was a pair of eyes staring intently down at them through the open skylight.

  But they did not belong to a robber. “Oh good, you’re home,” ten-year-old James Burns said cheerily and dropped through the opening into the studio without waiting for an invitation, a breach of etiquette that would have made his mother blanch, if he’d had one. He was followed by his younger brother, Baby, and his sister, Lucy, who at fourteen had an inkling that this was no way for a lady to enter a room, and consequently always arrived blushing. It was not clear whether Tuesday had unofficially adopted them or they her. What was obvious was that the three Burns children were almost as at home in Tuesday’s studio as she was, and certainly more at home than they were in their own deluxe establishment next door, with their stiff father and his profusion of servants and mistresses.

  Their toes had barely reached the ground before they all began speaking at the same time.

  “Where is he?”

  “Can you undo this knot?”

  “What rhymes with ‘oozed’?”

  Tuesday spent a minute sorting through these questions, then reached out a hand for the knotted gold chain dangling from Baby’s fingers, asked “Who are you talking about?” and, addressing the girl, said, “I thought we agreed that you would stop writing poetry about death.”

  “I have. This is a love poem,” Lucy explained, looking at her toes and blushing more.

  Before Tuesday could inquire further, two astonishing things happened: there was a thundering crash in the hallway outside the studio; and CeCe, after turning to him and saying “I told you so,” fainted into George’s arms.

  Lawrence had been banging on the front door of the house for a full five minutes before anyone noticed him. Even then it was only a young man who leaned listlessly out a window next to the door, glared at him hard, and asked, “Why d’you want to do that for?”

  Lawrence had stared at the man. “Do what?”

  “Knock like that. Drive a body batty.”

  “I was hoping someone would open the door.”

  “Oh,” the young man replied.

  Since he did not seem about to move, Lawrence decided to forego subtlety. He smiled. “Could you open the door?”

  “Me?” the man asked, surprised. “Certainly not. Not my job.”

  “But you are standing right here,” Lawrence pointed out. Not pointing out that the man’s throat was close enough for him to wring it.

  “Demeans a man, doing tasks not in his job. Cheapens him. Makes him less. Demeans him.”

  “You already said that.”

  “I’m studying to build my vocabulary,” the young man explained. He had turned from Lawrence for a moment, and when he turned back he extended a broadside out the window. “See, studying up the hard-word list. Comes out every week, a different letter each time. Bet you don’t know what those words mean.”

  Lawrence ignored the paper and focused instead on the young man. He was still smiling—these days he was almost always smiling—but it kept away from his eyes. “Do you know what the word immediately means?”

  “Of course. Everyone knows that.”

  “And the word excruciating? Do you know that one?”

  “Yes sir,” the young man replied, proud. “Also excursive. They was on the same sheet, one next to each other.”

  Lawrence’s smile was hearty. “Good. Then you will understand what I mean when I say that if you do not open this door immediately, you shall be in excruciating pain.”

  “Yep, got that clear as—wait a moment. Are you menacing me, sir?”

  “No. I am warning you. There is a difference. You have until I count to three. One. Two—”

  The door opened abruptly then, and Lawrence found himself face to face with a nattily dressed man with a sour expression on his face. “You did not have to heckle me,” the man said, stepping aside to let Lawrence pass.

  He stopped short as he crossed the threshold. On first glance, it looked like he had walked into any other entry hall of any other moderately wealthy nobleman, with a staircase running up one wall and a table holding a bowl of fruit, a classical style bust half obscured by a plant, and two gilded chairs upholstered in red velvet pushed against the opposite wall. But something was not right, and in his second glance Lawrence had realized what it was: the staircase was real but everything else—the table, the fruit, the chairs, the bust, the plant—they were all illusions. The hall was, in fact, completely bare except for an enormous painting on one wall that depicted the furnishings with exquisite skill. In his amazement at the painting, Lawrence momentarily forgot all about what he was doing there until he realized that the man was disappearing up the stairs.

  “Wait,” Lawrence called after him. “I am looking for Lady Arlington. Does she live here?”

  The young man, already halfway up the stairs, paused. The hint of
a smile crossed his face. “See that door right in front of you? Take that, then go left. At the second door, not the first. You do that, you’re guaranteed to find her. Guaranteed.” Then he disappeared.

  Lawrence had followed these directions, making his way through a labyrinth of dusty service corridors, until he came to an unpainted door behind which he could hear the sound of voices. There was a moment of silence as he put his hand on the door pull, and then suddenly he found himself flying headlong into a stuffed rooster while a gong went off in his head.

  Chapter 4

  “It works,” pronounced in a tone of muted awe, were the first words Lawrence could make out when the ringing in his ears quieted, and he was not sure he agreed. Whatever ‘it’ was, it certainly was not his jaw, which felt like it had been slugged, or his vision. He blinked twice and was about to try to push himself to his feet when he realized that there was something on his chest. Something squirmy.

  The squirmy thing leaned its face directly over his and said in a voice whose shrillness could have come only from a young boy, “His eyes are open! He is alive!”

  Before Lawrence could reply to this, he felt the boy being lifted off of him. Something tugged at his arm and he found himself in a sitting position.

  Gradually, the world came into focus, but it still made no sense. All the furniture that had not been in the entry hall seemed to be here, along with a hundred random items ranging from a suit of armor to the five-foot-tall stuffed rooster that had broken his flight, and whose feathers he was now wearing. And among these items were scattered a handful of people of assorted ages and sizes, who could scarcely have had less to do with one another. The only thing they had in common was the direction of their gazes, which were locked on him.

  Under their scrutiny Lawrence rose to his feet. He looked behind him, at the door through which he’d, ah, entered, and saw that it had been rigged with what appeared to be a pot lid at chin height. About a hands-width above the ground, a cord crossed the opening, tripping over which, he surmised, had caused him to take flight.

  Lawrence turned back around when he heard himself being addressed by a woman. “The top part of the burglar alarm was supposed to hit your head, not your chin,” she explained, pointing to where his hand was massaging his jaw. “You are too tall.”

  No apology, nothing. She just stated these things as if they were facts, as if it were his fault that he’d been attacked by her doorway. And Lawrence let her.

  She was taller than average, with hair the color of autumn grass, and she was holding a badly knotted gold cord in her hands. Her eyes—the gray-green of summer thunderheads before a storm and, Lawrence suspected, capable of flashing like them—rested on his face, but she was not meeting his gaze. In fact Lawrence had the strange feeling that she was studying his chin.

  Later he was able to identify what he felt at that first moment, what had stopped his tongue and made him incapable of speech, as a warning alarm. But at the time, it just translated into a single thought: he hoped like hell she was not Lady Arlington.

  Before he could ask her name, three children rushed on him and, in a flurry of elbows and knees and curtsies and bows, said simultaneously:

  “Is it true that you lived on rats when you were in prison?”

  “And that you have so many mistresses that you have to buy silk stockings by the boatload?”

  “My dog can dance, shall I go get it?”

  “Did you come just to see us?”

  “Do you know a word that rhymes with ‘oozed’?”

  The woman stared from him to his chorus before demanding, “What is wrong with the three of you?”

  “That is Lord Pickering,” the oldest looking boy replied, gesturing with his head.

  “The earl of Arden,” the younger one elaborated in a half whisper.

  “The hero,” the girl put in for good measure.

  Lawrence was growing accustomed to being stared at and interrogated and greeted awkwardly. It had almost stopped bothering him, like it no longer bothered him when women circled near, but not too near, him at balls, as if he were an exotic but dangerous beast.

  He was not, however, used to people bursting into uncontrollable laughter when he was introduced, which was exactly what the woman did. “You think that is the earl of Arden?” she repeated, slightly out of breath from chortling. “Oh. Certainly.”

  Silence fell over the room.

  “And you are?” Lawrence asked with annoyance. What the hell was wrong with him? It was his practice to be suave and charming and polite and smiling. It was how he was known. By everyone, even his enemies. But all he could do was frown at this woman and act haughty.

  “I? Hmm, let me see.” The woman seemed to ponder it. “I am—oh yes. I am Minerva. The goddess of war. No. Sorry. I am a gypsy named Samantha.”

  The girl gave her a reproving look, then said apologetically to Lawrence, “That is Lady Tuesday Arlington. You should excuse her, my lord, she really ought to learn better manners. CeCe and I have told her that a dozen times, but she does not listen to me.”

  “And with good reason,” an expensively dressed man of about his same age stepped toward Lawrence to say. “What proof do you have that you are who you say you are?”

  “Proof?”

  “If you were an earl, Morse certainly would not have told you to come in the servant’s entrance, especially since he knew there was an alarm on it. Besides, I’ve seen many earls and you don’t look much like one. More like a vagrant if anything.”

  He gestured toward a looking glass on one wall and when he glanced in it, Lawrence could see what the man meant. He had come straight here from the murder scene, not bothering to change out of the clothes he had worn to be a vagrant, nor to shave or bathe or even run a hand through his hair.

  His eyes moved from his own reflection to the room behind him. He’d been so preoccupied at first with the bizarre array of furnishings that he had not noticed the walls, but he did now, and what he saw took his breath away. If the illusion of the entry hall was a masterpiece, this room was a tour de force. Each of the walls had been painted to look as if they were draped in light poppy-colored silk. Along each of them hung brilliantly executed renditions of some of the greatest masterpieces of the previous two hundred years—Lawrence recognized a Michelangelo, a Jan van Eyck, a Botticelli, two Leonardo da Vincis and a portrait by the crazy Venetian Paolo Veronese—complete with ornate frames.

  From the paintings Lawrence’s eyes shifted to the face of Lady Tuesday Arlington. She had been looking away but now she looked at him, right at him, and for a moment their eyes met.

  In that moment Lawrence forgot all about the events of the morning, of the past weeks, of the last two years. He was aware only of her eyes on his. And a weird tickling sensation inside his head, like someone was peering around inside.

  Without permission.

  It was not pleasant. He wrenched his gaze away from the reflection and turned to face her, the lines of his frown deeply etched on his forehead. “You are Lady Arlington?”

  “Yes,” she answered, strangely subdued. He wondered if she had felt it, too. She handed the gold chain, unknotted now, to one of the children. “And you are Lawrence Pickering. Can I do something for you?”

  “Are these paintings your work? And the one in the entry hall?”

  “No they aren’t.”

  “Yes, they are,” the three children corrected in unison, and Lawrence did not miss the look of surprise bordering on alarm that the woman sent them.

  She asked, “Are you a connoisseur of paintings?”

  “I know a little about them. That one—” he pointed to her copy of a Leonardo da Vinci painting of a mother and child, “—is one of my favorites. Where did you see these?”

  “She didn’t. She copied them from a catalogue of an auction of the finest collection in England,” the girl said. “But now you must give your word of honor not to tell. Everyone around her
e knows but if her father knew that she was painting he would be mortified.”

  “Jenks, our steward, says that if it weren’t for Tuesday, her father wouldn’t even have shoes,” the older boy confided.

  The younger boy said, in a whisper, “But we must keep it secret. That is why George gets all the credit—”

  “—Even though he never picks up a brush,” his brother finished.

  The girl shot her siblings an angry glance, then looked back at Lawrence and asked, “Lady Arlington is very talented, don’t you think, sir?”

  This speech had been delivered over the protests of Lady Arlington who now turned to Lawrence. “Please disregard what they just said. George Lyle—” she gestured toward the well-dressed man, “—is the artist. Did you wish to commission a piece?”

  “No, I am not here about painting. I need to discuss something with you.”

  George Lyle, who through this indictment of his artistic powers had done nothing but watch Lawrence uneasily, spoke up now. “Do you want me to stay, Tuesday? I have an appointment elsewhere but I can—”

  “No, of course not.” She didn’t even look at him.

  His malaise increased. “Very well.” He turned to address the children. “That means you, too, you terrors. Off with you.”

  Three groans were followed by three haphazard bows and curtsies and murmured “It was a pleasure to meet you, sir’s.” As the girl was shuffling out the door, Lawrence bent down and whispered something to her.

  Her face lit up. “Bemused! Of course. Thank you, Your Lordship!” she exclaimed and ran from the room.

  “That was a good suggestion,” Tuesday said as the door closed behind all of them. “Bemused.”

  “For some reason it sprang to mind.”

  Tuesday nodded and bit her lip. There was something about the man that seemed to suck speech from her. For years she had been berated by her father for talking too much. Now she could not think of a single thing to say. Finally she managed to come up with, “Ah.”