It was for that reason, but not for that reason alone, that two evenings later he left the ball which she and her husband were giving at Kenilworth House long before Violet wished him to. He had bidden her ‘goodnight’ with all the charm which he could muster, but it was not enough to mollify her.
‘Leaving already!’ she had exclaimed, her beautiful brows arching high. ‘The night is yet young, and many who are years older than you are will not be giving up until dawn.’
‘Alas,’ he told her untruthfully, ‘I have been busy in the City all day, and such a concentration of effort carries its own penalties—I am sure that Kenilworth will have told you that.’
Cobie had always wondered at the workings of chance, and that it might be unwise to ignore them. Chance had led him to overhear something odd that night, something which had stayed in his memory. It was for that reason only that after leaving Kenilworth House, he did not go straight home to the Winthrops’. Instead he dismissed his carriage and walked down the Haymarket, which was so brilliantly lit that it might as well have been day.
The usual stares at his splendid self from both men and women followed him: he ignored them all and carried on his solitary way until he came to an alley about a hundred yards beyond the Haymarket Theatre. Looking down it, he could see a group of top-hatted men of fashion standing and smoking under a swinging lantern over an eighteenth-century doorway.
It must be Madame Louise’s: the brothel where the quality went, where discretion and high prices reigned. The conversation which he had overheard at the Kenilworths’ ball had him intrigued enough to consider going in. He had been leaning against a pillar, half-hidden, tired of the nothingness of the whole business, when he had heard two men approach and, quite unaware of his presence nearby, begin a muffled conversation.
‘Deadly boring tonight, eh, Heneage? Not that these pre-Season dos are ever anything else.’
Heneage—it must be the pompous dandy whom Cobie had met at Susanna’s equally boring thrash.
He was answering his companion in an amused knowing voice. ‘I know a better way of entertaining one’s self, Darrell, and it’s not far from here. Madame Louise’s place, in short. You can only visit there if you have the entrée—and I have. We could move on when I’ve done the pretty with dear Violet.’
Darrell—that would be Hubert Darrell, one of the hangers-on to the coat-tails of the great. They were rather like those extras in a play who are always shouting ‘Rhubarb, rhubarb’ at the appropriate moment. From the turn the conversation had taken Darrell was about to be introduced to some vicious inner circle.
‘Bit dull, though, isn’t it, Heneage? Just the usual, I take it.’
Heneage laughed patronisingly. ‘Oh, you can always find variety at Madame’s if you’re in the know, are discreet and have plenty of tin. You can have anything you fancy—anything—no holds barred. But mum’s the world, old fellow. Are you game?’
‘Game for anything—you know me.’
‘Then we’ll do the rounds here first, and sample the goods afterwards. I heard, don’t ask me how, that Madame has some new stuff on show tonight, very prime.’ Sir Ratcliffe’s voice was full of hateful promise.
They moved out of Cobie’s hearing, leaving him to wonder what exactly was meant by ‘no holds barred’ and ‘good new stuff’—and not liking the answer he came up with.
Curiosity now led him to enter Madame’s gilded entrance hall and to bribe his way past the giants on guard there since he came alone and unrecommended. This took him some little time. He thought, amusedly, that he might have been trying to enter a palace, not a brothel, so complicated was the ritual.
He agreed to hand over his top hat and scarf to a female dragon at the cloakroom, but insisted on carrying in his all-enveloping cape—which cost him another tip for a sweetener. There were reasons why he wanted to retain it. He then made his way into an exquisitely appointed drawing room.
Everything in it was in the best of taste. There was even a minor Gainsborough hanging over the hearth. Men and women sat about chatting discreetly. Among them he saw Sir Ratcliffe Heneage. He had a brief glimpse of a man being led through some swathed curtains at the far end of the room and could have sworn it was his brother-in-law, Arthur Winthrop, who had also left the Kenilworths’ ball early, pleading a migraine.
Madame Louise was tall, had been a beauty in her youth and, like her room, was elegantly turned out. Her eyes on him were cold.
‘I do not know you, sir. Since you have arrived without a sponsor or a friend, who allowed you, an unknown, to enter?’
‘Oh, money oils all locks and bars,’ he told her with his most winning smile, ‘but should I require a friend I have one here—Sir Ratcliffe Heneage. I am sure that he will confirm that I am Jacobus Grant, the brother-in-law of the American Envoy, and a distant relative of Sir Alan Dilhorne, late of the British Cabinet. Does that make me…respectable?’
Sir Ratcliffe, who had been watching them, was smiling with pleasure at the sight of the Madame of a night-house putting down the Yankee barbarian who had succeeded with Violet Kenilworth.
‘Yes, Mr Grant is who he says he is. We have been introduced.’
‘There!’ said Cobie sweetly. ‘What better recommendation could I have than one given me by Sir Ratcliffe? I may stay?’
‘Indeed. It is my custom to give a new guest a glass of champagne and ask him, discreetly, of course, what his preferences are. You will join me?’
Cobie bowed his agreement, secretly amused at her using the word guest instead of customer. A footman handed him his champagne and Madame asked him, discreetly again, ‘Are your tastes as unorthodox as your mode of entry, Mr Grant?’
‘Alas, no. I am distressingly orthodox in all I do, if not to say uninventive.’
He looked as pious as a male angel in a Renaissance painting when he came out with this lie, invention being the name of every game he played. He was not yet sure what game he was playing at Madame Louise’s, but he hoped to find out soon.
‘A beauty, then, and young.’
Cobie bowed again, ‘Quite so—and with the appearance of innocence. I am tired and do not wish to exert myself overmuch.’
He was taken at his word, and after he had handed over to Madame a fistful of sovereigns he was allowed to go upstairs—through the swathed curtains—with a young girl dressed in the latest fashion. She was lovely enough to have graced a Mayfair drawing room.
‘Her name is Marie,’ Madame had told him carelessly.
The bedroom she led him to was as exquisite as the room downstairs. She hesitated a moment before she stripped herself after he had sat on the big bed and thrown down the cape he had been carrying. Even then he made no attempt to touch her.
When she was finally naked, and Cobie had still said and done nothing, but continued to sit there, fully dressed, she walked towards him, her pretty face puzzled. She had not quite reached him when he lifted his hand.
‘Stay where you are, Miss Marie, just like that. On second thoughts, unpin your hair, and then begin to restore it to what it was.’
Her look of puzzlement grew, but she did his bidding—as she had been taught. When she finally stood before him, quite still, her shapely arms above her head, he murmured, ‘Now, don’t move, remain exactly as you are.’
‘You’re sure?’ she blurted at him. ‘Is this really what you want me to do?’
He nodded agreement while fetching from an inner pocket of his cape a sketchbook and pencil. He began, rapidly, to draw her, his full attention on every line of her beautiful body. For all the emotion he showed he might have been drawing a still life, not a glowing and vibrant human being.
A moment