Page 23 of Immortal Rose

“Because you don’t move like a military man,” I said. “You . . . saunter.”

At that, he opened his other eye. “Some would call that a noble bearing,” he said. “I know you’re awed, Lockwood, but please don’t start simpering. I’m rather enjoying the novelty of dispensing with all the expected niceties and having a straight conversation for once.”

God help me, I believed him. If Pembrooke’s bowing and scraping hadn’t been proof enough, this man’s boundless arrogance was the surest tell of all.

His eyes lingered on my mouth as I chewed, and I wondered if he was surprised I had the manners to close it or if there was something on my face. Resisting the urge to check, I swallowed the last bit of my meal. “You’re a lot less pleasant than the rumors portray.”

The seventh Earl of Foxcourt was a noted favorite of the scandal sheets for his good-natured humor, torrid affairs, impeccable dancing, and wild reveling. Depending on the week, the society gossips were just as likely to breathlessly report on him saving children from a runaway carriage as they were about him climbing out of a third-story window to escape a jealous, knife-wielding husband.

I could have sworn I heard him mutter, “Bloody ready,” beneath his breath.

“Did you really rescue a baker and his ten children from a fire?” I asked. “Because I’d just as soon believe you started it.”

“You’ll find not all the stories about me are true.” He shifted, trying to make himself more comfortable despite the bumpiness of the road. “Only the worst ones.”

I rolled my eyes heavenward at that, ignoring him until he dozed off again. Despite the exhaustion weighing my body down like stones, my mind was restless, too wary to follow suit, even for a moment.

I set the basket aside and slid closer to the window, lifting the curtain once more to watch the night-cloaked streets of Linden’s outer boroughs.

There were, indeed, other stories about the Earl of Foxcourt. Hushed stories. Stories even the scandal sheets had one day, years ago, decided were best left forgotten in favor of the tales of a fun-loving lad prancing about on an endless lark.

I remembered them still, braided as they were into my own sorry tale. I’d stolen glimpses of his life in the trampled, soggy broadsheets that littered the rotting woodblock streets of Riverside, in the years we’d lived near the dockyards. The taverns in the Brickbats had hosted drunken debates on the topic, and later, I’d caught tantalizing snippets of speculation from ladies and gentlemen in Royal Park and from their servants at Creed Garden.

The most common rumor was that his father, the Duke of Glenmoor, had murdered his second wife in a fit of rage or exiled her and her son once an affair was discovered. He then died himself of some mysterious illness—or curse.

The unembellished story, as it were, went something like this: The duke, a close friend of the King’s late brother, found dead. The second wife and second son of the Duke of Glenmoor, missing. The new Duke of Glenmoor, the elder son, ascending to his place at the head of the family and his seat in Parliament, publicly mourning all three members of his family, content to let their memory fade.

More mysterious yet: The second son’s return to society alone two years later, a ward of the Earl of Foxcourt, his mother’s uncle, the home secretary, and one of the King’s principal advisers. And, finally, his inheriting of his great-uncle’s title through his matrilineal line the year past, despite the protests of his elder half brother, after the previous Earl of Foxcourt had ended his own life upon falling out of favor with the King.

I remembered it all because I, too, had wondered. For years, the mystery had haunted me: Where had the little lord gone, and why had he come back? Some of the more superstitious souls in the Brickbats had sworn he’d been spirited away by fairies and raised in their hidden world beneath the isle’s ancient mounds, or that the young boy who returned was a changeling.

I allowed myself a stolen glance at the man, unsurprised to find him scowling even in his sleep.

Maybe he was a changeling. He was certainly as beautiful as one, in a way that only seemed to confirm that God had favorites. It would explain that heartless quality of his and could also be the reason I couldn’t pick up on any sort of essence.

Linden’s diabolical stench grew stronger as we neared the city’s center, and still, I watched him. Studied him. He’d schooled his breathing, keeping it slow and even, but something in the way his head inclined toward me made me think he was awake. That he was allowing my slow perusal for reasons that were entirely his own.

As if to prove my theory, he said, eyes still shut, “What were you looking for in the prison records? Or should I ask whom?”

I said nothing, letting the curtain fall back into place.

“You strike me as a solitary creature,” he continued. “It was one of the reasons I had a devil of a time finding you until I heard whispers of a perfumer at the Midnight Market. Someone from there? Perhaps a customer or . . . a sweetheart?”

“The woman I share a table with.” As reluctant as I was to reveal another piece of my life, the arrogance of his expression, that aristocratic indifference, made me bite out, “Given that Patricians have the means to pay others to care for them, it falls upon the rest of us to look out for each other, as no one else will.”

And certainly, no one else had looked out for Arabella. We weren’t friends—that would have meant taking her into my confidence, letting down the first of the gates to my heart. And you mustn’t, not ever, Mama had said over and over. You cannot trust another soul with who you truly are. But she mattered to me all the same.

If Foxcourt smiled then, I would have kicked him hard enough to scuff those glossy boots. Instead, he only watched me, his expression remote. “A rather damning assessment of life, isn’t it?”

“An accurate one,” I said, lifting the curtain again to watch the city pass. “Some of us do not have the privilege of living our life, my lord. We survive it.”

Foxcourt House wore the night like the finest sapphire velvet, its candlelit windows watching our approach with an eager glow.

Handsome and well-appointed, the detached four-story home overlooked the famous wooded park at the center of Feygrove Square. The romantic, whimsical style of the home was of the Oswaldian era, when public imagination, desperate to escape the horrors of the latest war with Gallia, had demanded a return to the time of towering castles, dragons, and fairies—without, of course, the pervasive damp and cramped quarters of their inspiration.

The house must have predated the newer, more symmetrical terraced homes across the square by at least a century. It was defiantly original.

A tangle of white and pink roses climbed over its gray stone walls, arcing into an abundant bower over the entry. I eyed the pale green door with its lion-head knocker before shifting my gaze upward, to where the rather enchanting Foxcourt crest was carved into the old stone—a fox with two crossed keys above it, the shield wreathed with oak leaves.