The Sins of Lord Lockwood (Rules for the Reckless #6)(4)
“Help Miss Galbraith,” she repeated coolly, and turned on her heel to find her errant husband.
The noises of the party drew her around the corner, and to doors that opened into a long gallery. Pausing there, she beheld a scene of complete debauchery: gentlemen in shirtsleeves with waistcoats flapping, women powdered and painted, feathers sagging from their hair. A stray dog or two frolicked amid scraps thrown by cheeky boys. Violinists were wandering among the crowd, sawing out street ditties—multiple ditties, none of them in tune. One wore a monkey on his shoulder. The creature was lifting his little hat in time to the music.
Out the windows that lined one side of the gallery, torches lit a lawn filled with couples. Half of them appeared to be dancing, but to no uniform rhythm or step. Pieces of clothing littered the grass—and glittering shards of broken glasses—and bodies, intertwined.
“Goodness,” she murmured. But her own voice was lost in the din of chatter and discordant tunes and the sudden explosion of a bottle hurled into the wall. “Watch for the paintings!” somebody cried.
It was then that she noticed the other wall of the gallery.
The paintings there showed scenes of slaughter.
After a moment, when her pulse slowed, she realized that these must be the Ashdown paintings. She had read about them in a newspaper she’d purchased at the platform in Peterborough. Her husband was a patron of the artist Miss Aurora Ashdown, and had hosted an exhibit recently for the titillation of his English friends.
Patron. She wondered if that was a polite euphemism, and Miss Ashdown was his mistress. Otherwise, why would he promote such nightmarish scenes? The artist had talent, but taste . . . ?
She averted her eyes from the paintings. The people cavorting beneath them hardly made a better sight. Gritting her teeth, she picked up her skirts and shoved her way into the crowd, using her elbows to clear a path for herself.
“Hey! Watch yourself—”
“Oi, sweetheart! What’s your hurry?”
She pivoted sharply at this last remark, catching the startled eye—and then, between her thumb and forefinger, the ear—of a lad who looked barely old enough to shave.
“What was that?” she asked sweetly. “Whose sweetheart am I?”
He blinked, his reddened eyes and chinless, sallow face lending him the look of a snared rabbit. “I—I—I reckon you’re nobody’s, ma’am!”
Not the cleverest retraction, but the sentiment served. Anna released him, wiped her hand on her skirts, and resumed her progress.
It did occur to her, as glass crunched under her boot and she spied the salon ahead, that she might not recognize Lockwood. Three years and eight months, after all. She herself had changed, so she liked to think. She had far better taste now than to trifle with bankrupt English lordlings, particularly those who had no better use for her money than the despoiling of decency and common sense—
There he was.
She drew up a foot inside the salon, watching through narrowed eyes as William Alexander Knollys Devaliant, fifth Earl of Lockwood, extricated himself from a sofa heaped with three scantily clad women, his balance clearly unsteady.
A pair of hands clung to him as he rose. Those hands belonged to a woman whose hair had been dyed a brassy false red. Lockwood, stepping forward, looked surprised to find himself caught. Looking down and discovering the hands that held him, he pulled them free, lifting one of them to his mouth for a kiss.
? ? ?
On occasional Tuesdays, Liam opened his doors to the crème de la crème of London society. On occasional Sundays, his staff made the invitations.
The contrast never failed to amuse him—particularly now, as some unnamed drug swam through his brain and lent him a novel perspective. Last Tuesday, some five hundred well-heeled Londoners—members of Parliament and gentlemen farmers and lords—had winced before Miss Ashdown’s paintings. Her images of the violent insurrection in British India had seemed to those guests like accusations. Society folk had murmured among themselves, then fled to the ballroom to guzzle champagne.
Tonight’s crowd, on the other hand, cavorted beneath those same paintings, admiring but not shocked. Working people—servants and barmaids, factory men and honest criminals—saw nothing unusual in such graphic depictions. Violence and power were but two sides of the same coin; this crowd knew it.
Liam had kept the ballroom closed. The music room stood locked as well, the interior burned after more recent festivities. Tonight, the musicians wandered freely, and the dancing took place on the lawn outside. The grass proved a novelty for this crowd, to whom London’s finest parklands stood closed.
In the salon, he’d gathered the small number of men whom he’d invited personally. They were penned there by Liam’s footmen, who had stationed themselves in postures of servitude but who nevertheless managed to loom in a manner that discouraged guests from pushing past them. Few of the celebrants noticed this, much less wondered if it was deliberate. Half of them were drunk, a quarter more dazed, like him, by the toxic tarry substance that Colthurst had brought to smoke.
Liam’s cousin was sober, though. Stephen Devaliant had accepted the invitation, delivered this afternoon in the reading room at White’s, very casually, as though there was nothing unusual in it. He was doing a very good job of pretending he had not tried to have Liam killed four years ago, much less that the greatest shock of his life had not been to learn of Liam’s return, this past autumn, and not in a casket—for Liam, despite his cousin’s best efforts, had survived.