Page 8 of The Duke Decides

She pushed those thoughts away. They were unfruitful. She had better than a family at the Benevolence Hospital, and all the children she could handle.

Now, she must do what she could to keep them.

Emmeline and Katherine were obliged to stand in the reception line to greet their guests, along with the Duchess, who was arrayed as the Empress Theodora of Byzantium. Louisa was free to float about and inspect Rutland House at her leisure.

She moved through a strange echo of her old life, as if she were a ghost revisiting the past. The elegant chambers with their high ceilings, rich furnishings, and expensive artworks: all this had been her world, once. The oil lamps cast their glow over gowns of silk and coats of velvet, feathers and ribbons and jewels. The click of her heeled shoes on the marble floor of the hall sounded in her ears, above the hum of conversation and flirtatious laughter of women who danced fans before their faces, sending meaningful messages to the gentlemen who bent close.

She marveled at the variety of costumes, from the daring to the frightful, all of them extravagantly expensive, all of them likely to be carelessly cast aside at the end of the evening. The wealth on display on the guests alone could fund the operations of the Hospital for years, perhaps for the rest of Louisa’s lifetime. All this coin spent on a night of revelry and enchantment, while not half a mile away, a house full of orphaned boys and abandoned girls and desperate, outcast women slept under woolen blankets on cots of twill and canvas or, for the older inhabitants, ticks of straw, grateful they would have three meals furnished them the next day.

All, save for the Sisters who had devoted themselves to the work of care, hoping their lives could, somehow, provide more.

Louisa didn’t ask for more. She only asked to keep what she had.

She made her way to the ballroom where most of the guests had collected, wanting to show themselves to advantage, eager to see if they could guess the identity of the others. She had told the thief—for what was a blackmailer but a thief, and a bold one—that she would wear red. She would do no more to make herself an easy mark. Perhaps, if he could not locate her in the crush, he would give up this pursuit and leave her in peace.

Or perhaps he would find better fortune if he approached someone else. Many women were wearing red. The King was dying—he had not emerged from Windsor Castle for years and it was expected he would not live out the year—and a change was in the air. His successor was the Duke of Clarence, whom his detractors called Silly Billy, and at five and sixty years of age, he was not likely to be the dashing figure that the current King had been in his youth. Any shift in power meant new opportunities, new alliances, and new foes emerging.

None of this explained why her assailant had chosen to make a target of her.

“At last we meet,” came a voice at her ear. A man’s voice. She startled, and he said swiftly, his voice low but distinct, “No, do not turn around.”

Louisa raised her fan before her face so it would not seem she stood talking to herself. Was this the ally she was meant to find? The shiver of warning that ran down the back of her neck said it was not. This man smelled of coal smoke and wet linen.

“I would expect no less than for you to skulk about in shadows,” she murmured.

Thoughtlessly, she had placed herself beside one of the tall marble statutes that graced the hall, the spoils of a previous Rutland’s Grand Tour. The thief had hidden himself behind the statue, where he could be shielded from view and come at her unseen.

She looked for a mirror, a glass, a lamp, anything that might show a reflection behind her shoulder. There was nothing but crowds and crowds of people, mingling, laughing, flirting. Enjoying themselves, while her world suddenly narrowed to the point of a pin, sharp and merciless.

Her assailant chuckled, not a kind sound. “I am not the only one wearing a mask, my lady.”

She tensed her shoulders and raised her fingertips to the half-mask tied to her face with a ribbon. The black silk obscured the top half of her face, traced with a subtle design of white embroidery. Ostrich feathers in white and black curled over her upswept hair. She had thought the effect fetching when she examined herself in Emmeline’s mirror.

“I do not merit that the address of lady,” Louisa said quietly.

“You once did.”

“Never,” she lied. “You mistake me for someone else. I am a weaver’s daughter.”

His low chuckle made her shiver again, and her terror was, to her surprise, not entirely unpleasant. Her stomach knotted like a tangled skein of embroidery silks. It was as if she wanted to fight.

“You were born of the house of d’Estreaux, and you married into the house of Grenay,” the thief said. “How many women would willingly give up the life of a comtesse?”

“Any woman who found her situation unbearable, I would imagine.”

“But imagine what the Grenay family would feel if they knew how you managed your escape.”

Louisa closed her eyes and clenched her fingers against her waist. How did he know this? How had he found out about her?

“What can you possibly want from me?” she whispered. “I have no more money to give you.”

Silence passed, and she wondered if he had moved on, wearying of this cat-and-mouse game.

“But perhaps your family does,” he speculated.

Who could he mean? “The d’Estreaux would pay you to keep me away,” she said, betraying herself. The pain caught at her, still sharp after all these years.

She had never thought to ask them for succor when she fled the chateau that was her prison, cinders in her hair, ash on her fingertips and in her mouth. Her parents had never heeded Louisa’s warnings about her husband, her aunts were helpless to provide aid, and her sisters faced the same forced doom that had swallowed Louisa. The d’Estreaux would denounce her as a traitor.