“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