Venetia knew the answer to that question without reading the small white card that had been tucked within the brown paper wrapping the stems. There were twelve roses, soft and velvety and of the deepest darkest red, and nestling in the centre of their arrangement, in such contrast, was a single creamy white rose, just as Robert had said. It was the message for which she had waited these weeks past. It had been so long in the coming that she had almost forgotten what she had agreed to. Almost.
Venetia picked up the card with its scrawl of black ink.
‘Looks like you’ve got yourself a new admirer. And one that hasn’t signed so much as his initial.’ Alice raised her eyebrows suggestively. ‘Very mysterious.’
Not mysterious at all. Venetia forced a smile, but it felt wooden upon her lips. Her eyes moved over the card and she read aloud the single word written upon it in handwriting that she could not fail to recognise—Tonight.
‘Sounds intriguing,’ said Alice. ‘Who is he?’
‘I have not the faintest idea,’ Venetia lied and threw the card down on the dressing table carelessly, as if it meant nothing.
‘That’ll put the cat amongst the pigeons with Hawick and Devlin,’ said Alice. ‘Hawick thinks he’s about to close the deal.’
‘Then Hawick is wrong.’ Venetia did not rise to the bait.
‘You’re leaning towards Devlin, then?’ There was a mischievous sparkle in her friend’s eye.
‘Alice!’
‘I’m teasing you!’ Alice grinned. ‘But if I had a duke and a viscount fighting to make me their mistress, believe you me, I wouldn’t be playing so hard to get.’
‘Better to earn your own money than put yourself in a rich man’s power,’ Venetia said, but the rich man she was not thinking of was not the Duke of Hawick or Viscount Devlin, and the woman enslaved, not herself.
She moved her mind away from the past to focus on the evening ahead… and just how she must snare a different rich man’s interest. According to Robert’s covert floral message the man would be waiting in the green room at this very moment. He was just another arrogant lust-ridden nobleman, like any other. Except he wasn’t. But she did not let herself dwell upon who he was and what he had done. Nor did she think about the danger. Instead, she focused herself with cool dispassion to the task that lay ahead.
‘Hurry yourself and turn around, Venetia. They’re waiting for us in the green room.’
‘A little waiting will serve to whet their appetites all the more.’ They were waiting. He was waiting. Venetia smiled a grim smile at the challenge ahead of her as she presented her back to Alice to unlace the bodice of her stage costume.
‘I should not have let you persuade me into coming here.’ Within the green room of the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, Francis Winslow, or Viscount Linwood as he was known, moved his gaze over the mix of gentlemen and peers already flirting with those minor actresses who had come straight from the stage. The room was decorated in the rococo style, the green walls edged with elaborate gold-leafed plasterwork, and set with large ornate mirrors before which crystal-decked candles burned. From the centre of the ceiling a single chandelier had been suspended, studded with few enough candles to hide the shabbiness of the room’s gentility.
‘Why? Do you not want to see the celebrated Miss Fox, or Miss Sweetly?’ The Marquis of Razeby raised an arrogant eyebrow.
‘Some other time, perhaps.’
‘Hell, Linwood, it will do you good and I tell you they are worth the seeing. If you thought they looked good upon the stage, wait until you see them up close. Miss Fox is all cool silver moonlight, and Miss Sweetly, all warm golden sunshine. Both divine in their own ways.’ He moved his hands in the outline of the curves of a woman’s body. ‘If you know what I mean.’
‘So I saw.’
‘Which would you go for?’
‘I am not looking for a woman right now.’
‘Been a while since the last one.’ Razeby arched an eyebrow.
‘It has,’ agreed Linwood. ‘I have had other things on my mind. I still have.’
Razeby persisted. ‘Maybe. But I think what you need is an armful of something warm and curvaceous and soft to distract you…’
‘I do not wish to be distracted.’ There was only one thing on Linwood’s mind right now. And he would have given the world if it had been something as frivolous and meaningless and pleasurable as a light-skirt. But those days were long gone and, given the mess his life was in now, he knew they would never return.
‘I have been working on Miss Sweetly and she is ripe for the plucking, but Miss Fox, well, she is a different story altogether. Sweetness versus sophistication. Can you imagine having both of them together? At the same time?’ Razeby blew out a sigh.
He understood Razeby was only trying to help, but his friend knew nothing of the truth, of what had happened, of the things he had done. He pushed away the thoughts, the memory of that final scene with Rotherham. ‘I will leave you to your actresses and your imagining,’ Linwood said. ‘And wait for you on the balcony.’
‘Miserable sod!’ Razeby smiled in his good-natured way and shook his head.
Linwood’s lips curved in the ghost of a smile.
Venetia knew exactly how to identify the man for whom she was looking. He carries an ebony walking cane topped with a silver wolf’s-head in which the eyes are two set emeralds. Robert’s words rang in her head as she worked her way through the men around the green room, all the while scanning for the walking cane. There were canes aplenty, but not the one that she sought. Yet both it and its owner were here; Robert would not have sent the message had he not been certain. And then she noticed the dark red curtain, masking the French doors to the balcony, sway slightly in the breeze. A frisson of uneasiness whispered within her at the realisation of having to do this alone with him, out there in the darkness.
It took thirty minutes to reach the curtain, via Razeby and Haworth and Devlin. But then at last she was able to slip unnoticed behind it. The door was only slightly ajar. She took a deep breath, pushed it silently open and, closing it quietly behind her, stepped out into the cool dampness of the London night.
The moonlight silhouetted him where he stood looking out over the lamp-lit street; a dark, lithe figure, silent and unmoving as if he were carved of the same Portland stone as the balustrade that contained the balcony. Her gaze moved over the dark beaver hat and gloves held in his left hand, and then on to the walking cane in his right. The tip of it touched to the leather of his glossy black riding boot and beneath his hand she could see the glint of the stick’s silver wolf’s-head handle and the glow of two tiny green gems within. And in that small moment before he moved, all of Robert’s warnings about this man and what he had done seemed to whisper in her ear, making her blood run cold. But even then she did not consider changing her mind. She stepped forwards, relishing the challenge.
He glanced round, half turned to her.
‘Do you mind if I…?’ She gestured towards the coping that topped the balustrade just along from where he stood.
‘Not
