How to Tame a Wild Rogue: The Palace of Rogues

A few minutes later Daphne found herself following Lorcan St. Leger up the stairs to the suite of rooms that Mrs. Hardy and Mrs. Bolt proudly referred to as the annex. The earring was back in his ear; as it turned out, he was in possession of pound notes to pay for their room, after all.

Captain Hardy and Lord Bolt had not reappeared.

The tall young footman had graciously insisted upon carrying her valise the entire distance. Daphne supposed this temporary relief of a little burden was part of what made The Grand Palace on the Thames exclusive. He would have carried Mr. St. Leger’s as well, if Mr. St. Leger had let him.

Mr. St. Leger carried his own portmanteau in one hand. She suspected he was capable of carrying the footman under the other arm, if the mood took him.

Daphne’s heart lodged in her throat at the foot of the stairs and remained there for the duration of the climb to their door. She felt a little as though she was floating above her own body, watching the little procession. She thought, “My goodness! Going up to a room with a strange man is the last thing on earth Lady Daphne Worth would do,” as though she were another person altogether.

She watched his back for any clues to the man she hadn’t yet ascertained from his front. His well-tailored coat stretched clean and smooth as a pelt across his shoulders. Each time they passed by the lit sconces (wax candles, from the looks of things, not tallow—another little luxury), she caught the glint of a strand of silver in his black hair. His boots were beautifully made and very well worn.

And by the time Mr. Pike turned the key into the lock, her heart was thumping so hard it nearly choked her.

Mr. St. Leger hadn’t said a word for the duration. He was obviously preoccupied, as well. Or perhaps he viewed her as luggage, something he’d inadvertently acquired and was now obliged to ferry from place to place.

When Pike proudly flung open their door (which, she noted, didn’t creak; the well-oiled hinges were polished to a gleam, the sort of detail she was accustomed to noticing), she saw a long, handsome settee upholstered in blue brocade arranged in front of a merrily leaping fire. Heavy wool curtains fell to the floor; paper striped in pale blue climbed to the picture rail. Several little tables paired with chairs were scattered about, suitable for writing letters or playing Spillikins or alighting at to devour the scones they were told would be arriving in the morning.

Remarkable what a few pounds could buy.

She desperately hoped he didn’t think it would also buy him a woman.

The two closed doors would be the bedrooms.

“The fires have been laid in the rooms and they should be nice and cozy,” Mr. Pike told them. “Do ring if you would like tea before eleven o’clock this evening. Otherwise, we shall see you at breakfast. So delighted to have you staying with us.”

“Thank you, Mr. Pike,” she said as graciously as if this was her very own home.

He seemed an enviable servant, the sort that were always a challenge to find and keep.

The sort that Daphne’s family had lost one by one.

The door clicked shut behind him.

They turned to face each other.

“Mr. . . .” She paused for a breath.

“Blackguard?” he completed helpfully.

“. . . St. Leger . . . I should like to make something clear.”

“I am all anticipation.” Though he looked, in truth, somewhat impatient.

She drew in a breath to steady her nerves.

Then another.

He watched her with great patience.

“While I am grateful indeed for the shelter tonight and for your assistance, I hope you shall not construe my presence alone in this suite with you as . . . that is . . . I hope you do not think that your generosity has purchased certain . . . ah, benefits, beyond the amenities. That is, I should like to tell you that you should not assume my presence in this suite with you is an agreement to . . . and while I did in fact t-touch your knee, for which I sincerely apologize, it was in the spirit of . . .”

The array of subtle emotions—astonishment, irritation, hilarity, anger, bafflement—that flickered in swift succession across his remarkable face made her falter to a stop.

A sort of detached amusement was what settled in at last.

Throughout he regarded her the way a lion might regard a mouse darting to and fro between its paws. Mildly amusing, a bit presumptuous and a trifle irritating, possibly not worth the effort to lift a paw to smash.

Her face was hot.

He said nothing for a moment.

“Virtue is quite the millstone, isn’t it, Lady Worth?” he finally said on a sympathetic hush. “You would have spared us both that little speech if you could only allow yourself to say, ‘I hope you don’t think you purchased rights to . . . ravish me.’”

He rolled the “r” extravagantly and ironically. She had the distinct sense that the delicate pause was less to spare her sensibilities than to give her an opportunity to imagine the word he really wanted to use.

He was mocking her, but not scathingly. She sensed she did not signify enough for him to scathe.

She remained mute. Mortified.

“Allow me to give you the benefit of my experience,” he continued, still politely. “Life is, on the whole, short, brutal, and unjust. And I expect if you ever do relinquish your virtue, you’ll wonder what all the fuss was about.”

She gave a short dark laugh. “Oh, thank you. Spoken like a man. Both the lecture about your ‘experience’ and your astonishing blithe ignorance of the societal value of so-called virtue to a woman. And what makes you think I haven’t relinquished it?”

God above, Daphne, she thought.

Why? Why would you say a thing like that?

Because his assumption was insufferable. It flattened her to a mere type. It made the real dramas and terrors and hopes of her life seem cheap and ordinary.

And frankly, she’d hoped to shock him.

He merely performed a skeptical, pitying, “Come now, Lady Worth” head-tip.

“To your concern. How should I put this?” He cast his eyes ceiling-ward briefly. “We might as well be two different species, aye? What sense would that make? Furthermore, my appetites do not run to unwilling women. At the moment your hair is standing up as fuzzy as a pussycat in the midst of a fright, and that’s no way to seduce a man.”

She met his gaze steadily.

The little creases at the corners of his eyes had deepened. That was the only way in which his steady, challenging expression had changed.

She nearly sprained all of her muscles in an effort not to clap her hands to her head and frantically smooth.

She desperately wanted to wake up from a dream in which she’d been standing in a strange room with a large pagan who had “appetites” and somehow knew the difference between “willing” and “unwilling” women. She was hardly completely naive. But her knowledge of debauchery was primarily gleaned from Greek myths in which fleeing maidens turned into trees to avoid the terrible fate of ravishment and luridly accomplished Renaissance canvasses filled with fleshy nude people writhing in gossamer draping.

Mr. St. Leger would not look out of place in one of those paintings. Or as a satyr, for that matter.

“In other words, you’re quite safe from me, Lady Worth,” he clarified when she said nothing. He still sounded insufferably amused, and a little distracted now. As though he was nearing the end of his willingness to humor her with conversation at all.

Despite everything, the emphasis on the word “quite” landed on the raw.

“Understood,” she finally said. Somewhat faintly. “Thank you for the . . . clarification.”

He nodded politely. “But I should warn you that patting a man’s knee might just give him wicked notions.”

“Do forgive me, Mr. St. Leger. I suppose you can always put your head out the window and let the rain extinguish your inflamed passions.”

His eyes went bright as lit windows when he smiled, delighted.

She cleared her throat.

“I should like to thank you for . . . for understanding the awkward social circumstances into which I had inadvertently walked when Mrs. Hardy recognized me. And for leaping selflessly into the fray, as it were. I expect the last thing you wanted to do this evening was acquire a wife, given that you hoped to take lodging in a bordello.”

It was as stiff and awkward an expression of gratitude as anyone had ever uttered. It also marked the first, and God willing, the last, time in her life she’d used the word “bordello” in a sentence.

But every person deserved the dignity of appreciation, regardless of their motives. She understood the terrible subtraction of being taken for granted, as though one was a mere utility, like a fork or a barouche. She was uncomfortable simply taking.

His expression grew more and more inscrutable as she spoke. He studied her a moment longer.

“While virtue may be a millstone, pride has its uses. And pride is about all you’ve got left, ain’t it, lass?”

He said it ironically.

Her throat seized up.

It was possible his startling astuteness was just instinct. Perhaps he knew this about her the way a fox might learn a thousand different things by sniffing the wind.

But she hated that he was right, and that he knew it.

Suddenly, exhaustion was like mud sucking at her ankles.

“Why don’t we talk in the morning about how we intend to maintain our marital charade for the duration of our stay here? Assuming this is how you mean to go on,” he said.

“Very well.”

He turned away, put his hand on the doorknob to the room. He froze like that a moment.

Then he pivoted a crisp half turn.

He seemed to be considering what to say as he studied her.

“If you’ll indulge my curiosity, Lady Worth. You thought that I assisted you from a second-story window in the dead of night in a storm, then dispatched a thief who set upon you, all in order to keep you alive long enough to ravish you in this peculiar little fairy land of a boardinghouse with rules and apparently stocked with everyone we once knew?”

He did sound curious, and not accusatory. They were different species, after all. He was trying to puzzle out her customs.

When he put it that way, she could see how it would seem churlish. She flushed.

“I . . . have stopped assuming anything at all about men and their motives. But in my experience, they often do just what they want with little thought to the consequences, particularly with regards to women. And forgive me if you don’t strike me as the sort given to . . . charitable works.”

Surprisingly, he half smiled at this. As if she’d just delivered a surprise he did not object to.

After a moment he said, “You were fleeing a man.”

Startled, she replied, “Yes.”

“Not a husband.” It wasn’t inflected as a question.

How did he know? Was he the type of man who could tell a spinster at forty paces? Perhaps all men could.

If she hadn’t felt desolate before, she did now.

How much information did she owe him?

And then she realized she ought to define to him who she was. To more clearly draw the boundaries of her character, and class, and station.

“The husband of an older, nearly deaf gentlewoman to whom I was briefly serving as a companion as she traveled to London to meet up with him, a position for which I was to be paid. He thought my duties ought to extend beyond the ones described to me. He was hovering in the room outside of my bedroom door, otherwise I would have made a more orthodox exit.”

Thusly she dryly summarized what had, in fact, been harrowing, frightening, and exasperating.

“Why would a gentlewoman, as you say, choose to stay in a room near the docks?”

Daphne took a breath. “The gentleman in question runs to extreme thriftiness. They were rooms over a shop owned by his solicitor, and he was offered the lodging for no cost.”

He dipped his head in a slow nod.

She sensed a dozen other questions were gathering in his mind.

But his expression changed not at all. It was clear this man was difficult to shock. Read one way, it was a strangely reassuring quality. Her own steadiness was all about effort, an effort she struggled to conceal.

His was different, she understood. And unnerving therefore. Because it seemed an earned quality. One would have needed to experience quite a few unthinkable things to achieve an unshockable condition.

What manner of man was Lorcan St. Leger?

“Why did you help me?”

“Damned if I know.” He sounded sincere, and puzzled. “God saw fit to make me do penance for past misdeeds, I suppose. And perhaps because I suspected you’d say things like ‘blithely ignorant,’ which is just about the funniest thing I’ve ever heard.”

He reached again for the doorknob.

“My apologies for the ‘damned,’ my lady, but there’s naught on the little card of rules about cursing in the rooms.”

He winked at her and vanished into his room.

She heard the door lock immediately. As if he was afraid she might rush into the room and touch his knee again.

Once Daphne was behind a locked door she stood, motionless, to see which of the thousands of emotions she’d struggled to hold in check all night would sift to the surface first.

She was surprised to discover it was exultation. It was weak and short-lived, like the last bubble to drift to the top of a glass of champagne. But there it was.

She’d successfully gone out a window on a sheet. There was a trick to alternating one’s feet that transformed it into a sort of ladder. A sort of puzzle to it. And she’d done it! If she ever needed to climb out a window using a sheet again, she’d be prepared.

She wished it seemed unlikely.

She’d not only gone out the window on a sheet, she’d apparently found the limits of her own self-sacrifice, which had heretofore seemed limitless. Not even to help her beloved father would she allow Mr. Daggett to squeeze the bottom of the daughter of an earl.

She didn’t know what she would tell her father when she returned home. Especially since she hadn’t yet been paid.

Lorcan St. Leger was precisely right. Pride was about the only thing that stood between her and ruin. Pride was the thing that had sent her leaping into the dark into the arms of a stranger, and pride was why she now had an enigmatic fake husband who was possibly a criminal. Pride was the boat she frantically paddled even as the steep Waterfall of Doom loomed to pull her over.

She couldn’t imagine why fate should take such an interest in her. She had been dutiful and uncontroversial. She hadn’t fatal beauty or reckless habits. Apart from her mother dying when she was young, there had been no warnings, no inklings, that her life would be happy to a certain point, and a disaster thereafter. That the scalding shame of Henry’s perfidy would be just the first of a seeming endless cascade of shame. More shame when she’d learned that her father was in desperate financial straits, more and more during the gradual peeling away of all of the trappings of their station, the servants, the horses, the house—scarcely noticeable at first, and then, terrifyingly swift, like the sands of an hourglass. More when she’d been compelled to discreetly find a renter for their home while she and her father moved into the caretaker’s cottage. Still more when she’d taken what had seemed to be an easy enough little job as a companion to Mrs. Leggett, only to discover what men like Mr. Leggett thought he could do to women who needed to take easy enough little jobs. She’d never before taken a job. It wasn’t what the daughters of earls did.

“You do not always have to know the why of things,” Henry had once told her, affectionately. Or so she’d thought. He’d said this when she’d tried to tell him why she loved oranges.

Because that was just it: she usually did thoroughly know. Why things moved her or did not. Why she liked or did not like them. Why things happened. She was filled with thoughts and feelings and no one had any use for them.

Now she wondered if she’d merely made Henry tired.

To her, the “why” of things enriched the good things in life, and made the bad things bearable, or at least more interesting.

If she’d known why any of this was happening, could she have somehow traced it to the beginning? Could she have stopped it?

At what point does a person going over a waterfall realize that paddling is futile? At what point does the attempt to forestall the inevitable seem ridiculous to anyone watching from a distance—that frantic scrabbling in midair before the plummet to doom?

Was she already laughable?

She wondered at Delilah’s journey from countess to boardinghouse proprietress. Had there been an interval of awkwardness and terror between her old life and the improbable one she’d embraced? Had Captain Hardy already been waiting in the wings to snap her up? Were the rules she’d written a clue to the contentment with which she glowed?

Because reading them only reminded Daphne that “pride goeth before a fall.”

She lifted the little card left on the charming and plain writing desk and read:

They were reasonable rules, of course. Comforting. Even genteel. The kind of rules a lady raised according to the etiquette and mores of fine society would compose.

But nearly every one of them meant she would need to convincingly pretend to be married to Lorcan St. Leger in front of an audience, and God help her and him.

She blew out a long breath.

Tucked in a walking shoe in her portmanteau was a plump letter she’d received from the Earl of Athelboro, whom she’d met once a half year ago, and with whom she’d spent a pleasant enough few hours when he’d visited her father. It had been sent to her care of Mrs. Leggett, and she’d needed to pay the postage with her dwindling funds when she fetched it only yesterday. She was down to just enough money to pay for a cheap room and a mail coach home.

The Earl of Athelboro had a weary smile and a countable number of strands of hair left on his head. He was fit enough, if gone to comfortable plumpness; outwardly, at least, he exhibited none of the usual habits that would lead to self-ruin. And he’d just been widowed for the second time. He’d fathered five children on two countesses, and they were all motherless now. She thought she knew what the letter would say.

She didn’t dare open it yet. She was too weary to think; she hadn’t any strength left with which to entertain either crushing disappointment or elegiac relief.

Best to read it by the light of day.

She swiftly transferred her clothes to the little wardrobe in the former Delilah Swanpoole’s improbable boardinghouse. She smoothed the skirts of dresses that were two seasons too old but still fit beautifully, gently folded away her stocking, her shawls, her night rails, tucked away her slippers. She always took scrupulous care of everything and everyone she cared about.

It had never seemed to matter much to anyone except her.

She did it, anyway. She loved, anyway. She couldn’t help it. When she loved, it felt to her fathoms deep. It took the whole of her up. Surely this ought to count for something? But she had never loved ostentatiously or dramatically. Perhaps that had mattered to Henry? Surely one could not help but notice the ocean if they stood next to it, even if it was still?

Loving anyone had not yet done much but crush her.

She performed her ablutions and got out of her dress and into her night rail and crawled beneath the covers of a clean and comfortable bed to await the rest of the emotions she’d kept at bay. They would be her company tonight.

Lorcan had slept in holds of ships strung with hammocks filled with sighing, snoring, farting men. He’d slept stuffed in beds in rooms packed with several families, and on fetid streets tucked behind barrels, pulling his toes in so the rats wouldn’t conduct their battles across his feet.

But he’d never lived with a woman for more than a week or so—and that was only if “living with” meant the same thing as “enjoying athletic carnal marathons”—but he expected it would be a bit like navigating a room that also contained a small, temperamental animal, perhaps a feisty squirrel.

He had long ago given up attempting to guess the ages of people; he only knew that happy people tended to look younger, and misery and hardship tended to etch itself into features. People living in squalor were capable of happiness, and people living in palaces were often perfectly wretched. Lady Worth was perhaps thirty years old, if he had to guess. Her face was pale and pinched, as if she were withstanding a good deal, or holding in a good deal. The only color in her complexion was the lavender crescents beneath her eyes.

But when she’d turned her face up to him on the settee her eyes had given him quite a jolt. They were the color of good whiskey shot through with firelight, and a surprisingly fierce spirit looked out of them. She was frightened, but she was a fighter, he would warrant. She was angry—more accurately, probably, indignant—at whatever hand the world had dealt to her and was struggling to regain her footing in it while keeping the shreds of her dignity intact.

What an abasement to have to pretend to be married to a man like him.

How she must be suffering.

He half smiled. Mordantly, but not entirely without sympathy.

He would not want to be married to him, either.

Lorcan knew exactly who he was. Her opinion of him could never possibly have a bearing on his opinion of himself.

When all was said and done, he’d really rather not have to live in a suite with her, but he’d brought it on himself, and it was of almost no consequence to him. And the acquisition of a fake wife was probably the reason he had shelter at all tonight.

Of more consequence was being confined to a building that also contained Captain Tristan Bloody Hardy.

He realized he was pacing and forced himself to stand still.

What a shock that must have been for Hardy to see him cozily ensconced on a pink settee, chatting with his pretty wife, a cup of their very good tea in his sword hand.

And yet that bastard hadn’t so much as twitched a brow when he’d seen him.

Bloody granite, as always.

God, he’d liked that man.

Just a little more than he’d hated him. But even hating him had felt more like sport. The way one hates the opposing team.

Perhaps being recognized by the vermin who would have cut Lady Worth’s throat for her had been a portent. Perhaps there would never be such a thing as “the past.”

Lorcan investigated his accommodations and discovered the bed was spectacular; the pillows were like angel bosoms, the mattress generously buoyant. He learned this by testing both with light thumps of his fist. No dust or insects rose.

Everything was so clean he was half-reluctant to sully it with his sweaty body.

He paused to rub a corner of the knit coverlet between his fingers, thoughtfully. It was soft and tightly knit of good wool dyed blue. Even now, when he could well afford it, some part of him remained cynical about and somewhat mistrustful of comfort. As if it was something he still needed to earn.

He located the chamber pot (painted all over with tiny flowers, apparently to make the maid’s job less odious). A pretty little pitcher (painted with pink roses, very nice) was filled with water, and a knit cloth (blue) was beside it.

He yanked his boots off and lined them up before the hearth. He stripped swiftly and installed his clothes with care in the wardrobe. The room was warm and the air felt soft on his naked body. He stood a moment, allowing it to settle over him, and closed his eyes. He hadn’t been lying about his aching bones: they reminded him of the brutal life he’d led and they warned him of storms. They were merely part of the general ambiance of his life, the usual sights and sounds and sensations. He noted them; they hurt, but they slowed him not. He paid no more attention to the aches than he did to the creaks of the house. He soldiered on, as always.

He performed some swift splashing and scrubbing of his sweatier body parts, and then he climbed into bed to let the soft mattress absorb some of the great weight of simply being alive.

As he did, he listened to the building groan and sigh in the wind the way all old buildings and ships do.

After a moment it was clear it was perhaps the quietest place he’d ever slept in his life. How ironic would it be if the quiet kept him awake.

The sough of the wind. The steady tick and splat of rain against glass. The intermittent creak and pop of wood swelling or settling.

Entwined with all of it a steadier sound he could not quite identify. Perhaps a cat meowing? Or distant laughter?

No. He realized it was weeping.

In the room next to him, Lady Worth was weeping.

Quietly. In a constrained way.

“In a constrained way” was likely how she did everything. Likely she simply couldn’t help it. It was how she’d been raised, like a Japanese bonsai tree. Confined to a precise, decorative shape.

Something had obviously blown the lady far, far off course, the way they sometimes discovered dazed, frazzled birds far from their native lands perched on the rigging when they were out at sea. Refugees from storms.

Life was suffering, he could have told Lady Worth. She’d fast lose that sense of suffering if she gave up the notion of how things ought to be and instead dealt with them as they were. They never did, though, the gentry. He in fact had counted on this, and prospered from it. They wanted what they wanted, war or no war. They wanted life to go on as it always had, with no sacrifice, no obstacles, and often, no expense. They might have their precious manners and rituals, but morals never got in the way of this wanting.

He’d made certain they got what they wanted. Silks and liquor, mostly.

In St. Giles, morality was a luxury. Or rather, it was subject to interpretation. When you came from nothing, when you had nothing, when everything around you conspired against your very survival, you soon learned what you could transform into currency. And for Lorcan, that was his wits.

The trouble with Captain Hardy was that the army had shaped his sense of moral rightness and it was now as rigid as his spine.

And people tended to break along the places they could not bend.

He didn’t suppose he could fault him. It was a matter of luck and luck was fickle. They had been boys together, for a short time. Tristan had found work when he was ten years old as the assistant of a naval commander, and this was what had shaped him.

If Lady Worth was a bonsai, Hardy was the mast of a ship. He had found a way out of St. Giles and into the daylight of respectable society.

While Lorcan had been left to find his way in the shadows.

And he’d learned dozens of invaluable things: How to sail. How to lead. How to charm, when necessary, bully when necessary, how to skillfully negotiate. How to manage money, and to invest it. How to speak French and German and Spanish. He’d learned byways and alleys all up and down the coast of England, and he had friends everywhere. Enemies, too.

He’d been proud of the way he’d conducted his work.

Seeing Captain Hardy was a bloody unwelcome reminder that he’d never been proud of the work.

There came the day when Lorcan was approached by a man off the coast of Cornwall he quickly suspected of being less interested in commerce than in spying for the French. He’d bartered the man’s name to a bloke who worked in intelligence at the Alien Office, a certain Mr. Christian Hawkes, a man whose morals were as situational and as pragmatic as Lorcan’s, for a privateer charter. And Hawkes had made sure he got one.

Because he’d wanted a chance to work in the daylight, too.

And now Lorcan was well on his way to being wealthy.

He didn’t know if he believed in portents. But perhaps seeing Hardy again was a way to measure how far he had come. A way to remind himself that he’d done it almost entirely on his own. That not even a proud man like Hardy had been able to outsmart him. That there was likely nothing he couldn’t have or do now.

His consciousness began to drift, the sound of Lady Worth weeping dissolved into and became all of a piece with all the ambient sounds of his life so far, rain and the crash of waves, weeping and laughter and screams, gunshots, laughter, moans, flesh striking flesh, the snap of sails, and he slept.