A Lady of Integrity Page 8

  “I should be delighted. But I didn’t mean the girls. I meant that young man who was with you in the Canadas. The very rude one. We spoke at the ball.”

  “Rude?” Claire’s eyebrows went up. “I should hope no young man of my acquaintance would be rude to a lady. He was not of a dark complexion, I hope?”

  “No—at the time he would have been fourteen or fifteen, with reddish hair and a chin that I suspect is probably quite fearsome by now.”

  “Jake?” Alice blurted. “Are you talking about my navigator? I do recall that you and he were talking aboard Count von Zeppelin’s ship, just before the explosion.”

  “Yes, a brief but rather memorable conversation from my point of view. Is he here?”

  In the tick of silence following the question, Alice heard seagulls mewing, like the cries of the lost.

  “I am afraid not,” Claire said smoothly. “We lost him to another field of employment. He and Alice parted ways some time ago.”

  “Oh, I am sorry to hear that,” Gloria said, clearly disappointed. “I had hoped to give a better impression this time.”

  “I’ll be sure to pass the message on if I ever see him again,” Alice said. How good they were at telling tall tales. It didn’t seem fair, after Gloria had been so kind and so glad to see them all. “Come, we should take in at least a few of these other pictures before we meet the girls and their friends.” It was the only sacrifice she could make for Gloria’s sake, and she endured looking at picture after picture—some lovely, some utterly puzzling, some she was quite sure a baby could do a better job of with its fingers—until the tower bell struck four.

  “Claire, maybe Gloria and Captain Hollys and I could secure a large table in the tea pavilion,” Alice suggested. “You and Andrew ought to stay just outside to wave them over.”

  Claire nodded, then said, “There are so many of them that perhaps the others might take a table of their own. Since our party is now augmented by one, I am sure the girls would appreciate the information.” She gave Alice a speaking glance, and suddenly the latter understood.

  Gloria’s father had, for all intents and purposes, had Maggie imprisoned with every appearance of willingness to let her drown. He had kidnapped young Claude and used him to blackmail the girls’ grandparents into allowing a French invasion on the long expanse of their seaward-facing land—until Maggie had foiled it.

  Alice had no doubt that without adequate preparation, the girls would mistake Gloria’s presence for that of her father, and who knew what might ensue.

  Alice wouldn’t put it past them to incite a riot.

  *

  There must on no account be a riot, Claire thought, waving at the Mopsies as the two of them led the way across the square. It would bring them to the attention of the authorities, and that must be avoided at all costs.

  In moments she and Andrew were surrounded by what seemed like a flock of birds, all chattering at once, crowding her with their skirts and bumping her hat and—oh, bother, she’d dropped her handbag—

  “Lizzie, Maggie, Claude, a moment, if you please,” Andrew said with enough authority in his tone that the three of them, at least, stopped talking. “Just to the side, here. We must speak with you before you go in.”

  “Sounds rather serious,” Claude said. “Can’t they seat us all together?”

  “We don’t need to all sit together, like obedient children with the governess,” said one of the girls, laughing. “I prefer to be independent.”

  “You may do as you like,” Claire said coolly, taking her handbag from Lizzie with a smile of thanks and dusting it off. Thank goodness she had concealed her own lightning pistol in a slender holster on her boot, under her voluminous skirts. If she had kept it in this velvet bag, the glass globe might have shattered on the pavement. “My business is with the girls and Claude.”

  “Lizzie’s in trouble again,” the girl singsonged.

  Arabella, that was her name. Arabella de Courcy. “You must have just left your governess, if this is how you behave in public,” Claire said in the frosty Belgravia tones that never failed to cut their object down to size. “Perhaps it is a good thing you prefer to sit elsewhere.”

  Arabella sniffed, took the arms of two of her companions, and swept them into the pavilion.

  “Well done, Lady,” Maggie said. “It’s so exhausting trying to be polite to that girl.”

  “I’ve given it up,” Lizzie said, clearly not sorry in the least. “The trouble is, no matter how insulting I am, she thinks I’m joking. It never occurs to her that my remarks are perfectly sincere.”

  “Lizzie, no matter the provocation, a lady does not insult others on purpose.”

  “But—”

  “Talking of sincere,” Andrew said hastily, “we have information for you that must be communicated before you go in.”

  “Have you heard something of—?” Lizzie stopped herself before Jake’s name tumbled out and revealed them all as frauds.

  “No, of someone else,” Claire said. “Maggie, Claude, this affects you particularly. There is a young lady sitting with us whom you girls will remember from the Canadas. Gloria Meriwether-Astor.”

  “Gloria!” Lizzie repeated. “The one who helped Alice’s dad escape?”

  “Yes. What a good memory you have.”

  “Why should that affect us?” Maggie asked, sensing in her own peculiar way that something deeper was afoot. “I shall be glad to see her again. She’s handy in a tight spot.”

  Claude raised one brow. “Are there more tight spots in your chequered past?”

  “You have no idea,” Maggie assured him.

  “And we should like to keep it that way,” Claire said. “Claude, I must tell you that she is the daughter of the man responsible for holding you for ransom in France. We believed him to be aboard Neptune’s Fury when it went down in the Channel, but we observed just now that Gloria is not wearing mourning.”

  “I shan’t complain about that. Never met a girl yet who looked other than a fright in it.”

  “You are missing the point, brother dearest,” Lizzie said fondly. “If she is not wearing mourning, then she still has a father.”

  Maggie clutched Claire’s sleeve. “Lady, he’s not here, is he?”

  “I do not know. But that must be our primary purpose in asking Gloria to tea, besides the pleasure of her company. We must find out first if he really is alive, and second, where he is.”

  “I agree,” Andrew said. “I am already looking over one shoulder. I should not much like having to look over both.”

  10

  “My father?” Gloria repeated rather blankly as Lizzie polished off the last of the little tea cakes and Claude enjoyed his third Burano biscuit. “Forgive me, but are you acquainted?”

  “We met in the Canadas, do you not remember?” Claire’s tea had gone cold, and she had no appetite for cake. All her concentration was given to making this conversation seem light and friendly and inconsequential. It was hard work. “I hope he is well?”

  “I suppose he is. I have not heard that he is not.” When Claire showed her surprise, Gloria went on, “We have not been on the best of terms lately. I have been living in Paris at our house there, while he has been doing what Father does—shipping things and making pots of money.”

  “Is the airship business in the Americas successful?” Andrew asked. “We had heard he had expanded his operations to include the Atlantic shipping routes.”

  Claire resisted the temptation to step on his foot under the table.

  “He tried that,” Gloria said, “but it doesn’t seem to have been a success. Too many accidents and some ships and crew lost.”

  “Oh, I am sorry,” Maggie said, her sympathy for the crew quite sincere.

  “But he wrote me recently to say he would be in Venice on business and wanted to let bygones be bygones,” Gloria went on. “That’s why I’ve come for the Exhibition. He will be meeting me this evening at the ball at the Palazzo Viceconte.” An idea seem
ed to strike her, and she touched Claire’s arm. “Oh, do come, all of you. I’m so tired of traveling with only a chaperone, and she never wants to do anything interesting. At least if I’m there with you, I might have a chance at actually dancing. And Father will not lecture me on my inability to catch a duke if I am there with a party that includes gentlemen.”

  “Come to a ball?” Claire repeated. “Uninvited?”

  “Oh, I’ll send a messenger over with as many invitations as you need. Do come,” she begged. “I haven’t seen Father in months, but that is no guarantee that all is forgiven and forgotten. He was so angry and disappointed in me that I would love the moral support when I see him again.” Her gaze fell to the tablecloth. “He won’t cause a scene in public—particularly in the home of his host.”

  “His host?” Captain Hollys said.

  “Yes, the Viceconte di Alba. He is a cousin or something of the Doge and holds some high position in the government. Don’t ask me how Father knows him—but if I know Father, it’s through business and not pleasure.”

  Claire and Andrew exchanged a glance, which then widened to include Alice and Captain Hollys.

  “Not that I plan to go along, but … the Viceconte di Alba?” Alice said, as though trying to recall his connections. “Isn’t he the Minister of Justice or some such?”

  The Minister of Justice! Could he be the man ultimately responsible for Jake’s imprisonment—possibly even the man who had sentenced him? How could they walk into his very home, like so many flies dancing along a filament into the spider’s web? Of course Alice would not go. It was far too dangerous for her, as there would surely be those in attendance who would recognize her.

  “Oh, Lady Claire, do say yes,” Claude urged her. “It’s just the thing to liven us up.”

  “Yes, do,” Lizzie echoed. “Imagine being invited to a ball in Venice. I can hardly wait to tell Arabella.” She shot a wicked glance over at the next table, where the others were laughing and chattering as though there were no connection between the two parties at all.

  “It’s fancy dress, if that helps,” Gloria put in with an air of a gambler sweetening the pot. “There are a thousand costume shops in the city, because of Carnivale. You could come as just about anything.”

  Fancy dress. With masks.

  Perhaps Alice need not be left behind, after all.

  Claire’s polite smile widened into sincerity. “Masks would be entirely appropriate, though we have no need for a costume—the girls and I, I mean. We have just the thing, don’t we, girls?”

  *

  “This is madness,” Captain Hollys muttered for what had to be the tenth time, pacing at Alice’s side like a tall, grumpy … lord.

  At least, Alice thought he was a lord. Were baronets considered lords? It did not matter if they were or not—he had been outmaneuvered and out-argued, and here she was, walking to the ball with her very own noble bodyguard.

  Whom she was determined to lose at the very first opportunity.

  “One slip of the mask and you will be recognized,” he said, “and then all Her Majesty’s efforts on Jake’s behalf will be for naught.”

  “I’ll just have to make sure my mask doesn’t slip, then,” Alice said cheerfully. “Fortunately, everyone expects Colombina’s face to be painted, so it could be torn right off and I’d still be all right.”

  Ian, dressed as a harlequin, in long bloomers and a silk blouse you could fit both the Mopsies into, glared at her out of his blacked eyes. “If it is torn off, that means you will have been in a fight, and that must not happen under any circumstances.”

  “Oh, Ian, do give over,” Claire said, taking his other arm companionably and patting it. “We must keep a positive attitude. And you must loosen up a little. You move too much like a military man.”

  “I am a military man,” Captain Hollys said through his teeth.

  “No, tonight you are a harlequin, a trickster,” Andrew told him. He and Claire made an odd couple—he as a pirate, and she in her raiding rig. Both wore the elegant gilded masks that were for sale at the base of practically every bridge in town, made of papier maché and tied behind with silk ribbons. “Tonight you move loosely, with grace and stealth, not command.”

  “Alice, too,” Lizzie said. “That motley dress is so short you won’t have any trouble dancing.”

  “I won’t be dancing,” Alice informed her. “I’ve never shown this much shin in my life, and I certainly don’t intend to parade it on the ballroom floor.”

  “There will be any number of Colombinas,” Claire told her in soothing tones that did nothing to calm the butterflies in Alice’s stomach. “No one will know. Just remember—we are not going to dance so much as gather information. Mopsies, you are to scout where you should not be, and listen where you are not wanted. Alice, if by some mischance you are recognized, Ian will whisk you out of the palazzo and back to our hotel. Tigg and Andrew and I will engage likely guests in conversation and try to learn more about where Jake might be held.”

  “And not a word to Claude,” Maggie reminded her cousin. “He cannot be trusted not to blab, though of course he would never mean to hurt anyone.”

  “I still don’t like abandoning him to Arabella and that lot,” Lizzie said, kicking a stone off the pavement with her dancing slipper. It hit the water with a hollow sound and sank with no indication of the canal’s real depth. “I don’t think they’re good for him. Instead of encouraging him to go home and get a start in the business, they keep telling him to come hither and yon with them, frittering away his money and his time.”

  “They can only give the advice they know to be true for themselves,” Claire said. “But don’t fret. Between you and Maggie, he will see the light. Just not tonight. You have work to do.”

  Below them, a glossy black gondola slipped through the dark water, poled by a man in a loose shirt and trousers. A giggling crowd of girls in filmy white dresses and white face paint, their eyes hollowed out with black, filled it practically to sinking.

  “Wilis,” Claire said. “You know, the spirits of jilted maidens in Giselle, the ballet.”

  Watching them float away, Lizzie asked, “Is that where that expression comes from—‘he gives me the willies’?”

  Wherever the word came from, Alice had the willies, well and truly, and the prickly feeling on the back of her neck under Colombina’s wig only increased as they presented their invitations, were welcomed into the palazzo, and twenty minutes later located Gloria and her chaperone in the ballroom.

  “Oh, thank goodness.” Gloria practically fell on Alice’s and Claire’s necks. “Given that Father isn’t your favorite person in the world, I thought you might not come.”

  “I’ve got nothing against him now,” Alice said. “He’s paid the debt the government of the Canadas required, and you can’t ask for more than that.”

  The words weren’t entirely true, but Alice was glad she’d fibbed when Gloria’s face softened with relief. “You’re so kind.” She turned to Claire and squeezed her hand. “All of you. I’m lucky to have friends like you.” The orchestra struck up a waltz, and she clapped her hands. “Listen! It’s Strauss—my favorite.”

  How could such a wicked man have a daughter as guileless as Gloria? Alice wondered. Or was her approach to life the only way she could survive—the equivalent of hiding one’s face behind one’s hands?

  “Gloria,” Claire said, “I believe your father is coming this way. Is he dressed as a Roman emperor?”

  “I don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me. He’s bound to make comments about my coming alone. Oh, if only I had a partner!”

  Alice nudged the captain. “Go on. Ask the girl to dance,” she said in a low tone.

  “I am not leaving you,” he replied stiffly.

  “I’ll be right here with Claire and Andrew. Quick. You’ve got a title and you’re eligible. You could get her pa off her back for weeks with one dance.”

  “Great Scott.” The captain implored patience
of the frescoes on the ceiling. “Very well. Miss Meriwether-Astor, would you honor me?”

  Gloria skipped off with him so fast she might not have been there at all, and by the time her father joined them, she and the captain had whirled halfway around the floor.

  “Mr. Meriwether-Astor, what a pleasure to see you again,” Claire said politely, extending her hand.

  Alice would rather simply have shot him, but that wouldn’t be polite.

  The man peered at Claire from under the leafy excrescence of his laurel crown. “I’m sorry, you have the advantage of me. Did I see you speaking with my daughter?”

  “You did. She has procured invitations for us, for which we are most grateful. I was at school with her in London, and met you briefly in the Canadas, in Edmonton at the governor’s ball. I am Lady Claire Trevelyan,” she said rather grandly, and introduced everyone but Alice, who did her best to melt into the crowd behind them, close enough to hear but far enough away to appear not to be with their party.

  So this was the man who had nearly gotten her pa strung up like a criminal. Who had backed the French pretender to the throne in hopes of being the power behind it, and financed an invasion that had only failed because of the quick wits and bravery of the sixteen-year-old girl standing not three feet away. This stout, barrel-shaped man with the red face and the iron eyes was forbidden both European and English skies.

  So what was he doing here, pretending to care about his daughter’s friends?

  “Is that my Gloria there, with that tall harlequin?” he asked as they whirled past.

  “She makes a lovely shepherdess, does she not? That tall harlequin is Ian Hollys, baronet,” Claire said with her best society smile. “I believe she may well have made a conquest—her first of the evening.”

  “Is that so? About time she was good for something.”

  Claire blushed, and even Alice winced at his willingness to shame his daughter behind her back.