A Lily Among Thorns Read online

  Usually she liked to keep her desk between herself and visitors, but on impulse she came around and leaned back against the front edge. From up close, he looked even more tired, and thinner than she remembered. What had happened? Did it have anything to do with the help he wanted from her? “So, what is this heirloom you’re looking to recover?”

  He gazed out the window behind her. “It’s the Stuart earrings. My grandfather’s great-grandfather, John Hathaway, let Charles the Second spend a couple of nights in his printing house when the king was fleeing one of Cromwell’s victories. Charles gave him the earrings as a reward. If you ask me, it’s a blot on the family escutcheon—not that we have one. I’d prefer a ‘death to tyrants!’ sort of forebear. But last week the earrings were being sent up to Shropshire by special courier for the wedding, and a highwayman robbed the coach. Susannah won’t get married without them.”

  Ah yes, Susannah. If he was engaged, why was he running on as if he’d barely spoken to anyone in who knew how long? The amount of words convinced her that she was right and he wasn’t shy, only distracted or unhappy. Clearly Susannah wasn’t taking proper care of him.

  Not taking proper care of him? she mocked herself. Who are you and what have you done with Serena? Next you’ll be making him calf’s-foot jelly. “The earrings are valuable, I take it?”

  He shrugged. “The workmanship is excellent. Two goodsized rubies set in gold filigree with four tiny diamonds—very grand for a Hathaway, but nothing out of the common way for a Ravenshaw.”

  Serena didn’t wear jewelry. Possibly he was realizing that, because he glanced up at her hands and neckline and then launched back into speech without ever meeting her eyes.

  “But that isn’t it. It’s the family superstition. The king told John that they would bring him good fortune. There’s even a verse saying to give them to one’s wife for luck. And sure enough, the woman John loved was widowed in a tragic oven accident and they were able to marry. Since then all the Hathaway brides have worn the earrings. By now, that means that if one doesn’t wear them—”

  “Bad luck, yes. But surely you, Solomon, are not so—unwise—as to be swayed by such things.”

  He looked at her then. “A pun on my name, how original.” But he was smiling a little, which threw her off. “Susannah lacks the scientific temperament.”

  She couldn’t help it: she leaned forward. “And yet you’re marrying her.”

  He blinked. “What? Oh—Lord, no. Susannah’s my sister. It’s not my wedding.”

  Relief flooded her throat; she swallowed it and took refuge in sarcasm. “My apologies. Susannah is lucky to have such a scientific gentleman for a brother.”

  He stiffened. At first she thought he was taking exception to her tone, but then he said, sounding affronted, “I’m not a gentleman. I work for my living. My lady.”

  She raised her eyebrows, startled. “I apologize if I’ve accidentally dampened your pretensions to being a member of the lower orders.” Of course, she worked for a living, and she had an aristocratic accent and dressed to the nines. But she was a special case. Wasn’t she?

  He looked down at his clothes, and went faintly pink. “Oh. I—I borrowed these clothes from the shop. My uncle Dewington hates it when I visit him looking like a tradesman.” He gave her the edge of a crooked smile, as if waiting to see if she’d smile back. “You can’t see it, but there’s a hole in my stockings. Here.” He circled a spot on his breeches just above the knee. His kid-gloved index finger rubbed against the buckskin, only inches above the row of buttons stretching the leather tight around his calves, and Serena felt her temperature rising. She didn’t smile back. “And I gilded the watch-chain myself.”

  “You did?” The chain looked brand-new and perfect. Why would he know how to do that?

  “I’m a chemist,” he said proudly. “Well, I do some design and pitch in with the tailoring when Uncle Hathaway needs the help, but mostly I make all our dyes. We match any shade, and we’re famed for the brilliancy of our colors.”

  And then the whole story came back to her. Hathaway’s Fine Tailoring, the men’s shop on Bond Street that was all the rage these days. It had been opened almost thirty years ago, before Serena was born, by a pair of brothers fresh up from the country. But one of the brothers, having more of a taste for religion than business, had soon left the shop to be ordained. During his studies, he’d supported himself as a Latin tutor—in the Earl of Dewington’s household, among others. Lady Lydia had run off with him, and not been acknowledged by the family again until her father’s death. Her brother, the present earl, had been generous enough to send her son to Cambridge, only to be neverendingly mortified when the boy chose to work at Hathaway’s Fine Tailoring after all. And that was Solomon, apparently.

  There was something else, though, something Dewington had told her about his nephew. What was it?

  “So will you help me?” he asked.

  It was such a tiny favor, tracking down a stolen piece of jewelry. Would it really even the scales? She didn’t want to be in his debt anymore. Maybe you just want to keep him around, she suggested scornfully, and then told herself to shut up. “Certainly. I’d also like to order some cloth from you. Some of our beds need new hangings, and the wallpaper would have to be matched.” She tilted her head. “Are you sure you can do it?”

  He straightened. Ha! She’d thought that would get him. “Yes,” he said curtly. “I could match the color of your eyes better than your current modiste, too.”

  She glanced down at her gray bombazine in surprise. “Could you?” Didn’t it match? And—he’d noticed her eyes?

  For the first time since he’d got there, he looked into her eyes for longer than a few seconds. Stared into them, and she couldn’t look away. Couldn’t help breathing faster.

  He frowned, a tiny line between his brows. They arched so perfectly. She was drawn to him, and she didn’t want to be. “Solomon?” she said coolly, or meant to. Her voice was rough and hot.

  He might not have noticed. That deep, deep flush swept over him again, and she smiled involuntarily. “Now I understand why you dyed your waistcoat that enchanting shade of red.”

  “Wh—?” He cleared his throat. “What?” he asked, his husky voice dropping even further.

  “It matches the tips of your ears to perfection.”

  He rolled his eyes, but he smiled sheepishly back.

  Christ, she was flirting with him. She had to get him out of here before she completely lost her dignity. “As charming as this interview has been, I’m sure you have business to attend to. Have supper with me tonight, and we’ll discuss the details of your little robbery.”

  “Then you’ll help me?”

  She nodded.

  He looked relieved. “We can pay you, of course—”

  There. Now she didn’t feel like flirting. “No,” she interrupted. You will never pay me for anything, ever again. She swallowed the feeling of claustrophobia. Maybe if she paid back this one great debt, she would feel free for once in her life. “Let Sophy show you to your room. You’ll be staying here. Gratis.”

  His jaw dropped. “I couldn’t dream of it! This is much too elegant an establishment for me—I have rooms—”

  “I daresay you do—in Cheapside,” she said, naming a neighborhood in the City filled with warehouses, butchers’ shops, and tradesmen’s lodgings.

  He glared at her. “I’m not ashamed of my address.”

  He was so prickly. She tried not to smile again. “As worthy and respectable as Cheapside no doubt is, it’s some little distance from me, and I want you on hand to consult with.”

  “I don’t see why that’s necessary.”

  It wasn’t necessary. In fact, it was probably a terrible idea. Too late. “You want my help, don’t you? Susannah and her betrothed are waiting . . .”

  “You won’t help me unless I stay here?” He sounded as if he didn’t know whether to be annoyed, or just puzzled.

  “Believe me, you won’t b
e arguing with me once you’ve had supper. My chef is the best in the business.” You just think he hasn’t been eating enough. You’re acting like somebody’s mother. She crossed her arms. “That’s my offer. Take it or leave it.”

  He spread his hands in a frustrated, resigned gesture. “If I’m going to stay here, I’ll have to bring all my equipment from my rooms,” he warned her.

  “Then do so at once.” She rang the bell on the wall behind her desk. When she was done with him, he’d be so far in her debt he’d never get out. She just had to do it before he realized who she was and headed for the hills.

  How had he agreed to this? Lady Serena was strange and confusing and quite possibly mad, even if she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. But Uncle Dewington had said she could help find the earrings, and his mother was at her wit’s end. It was his duty to obtain Lady Serena’s help by any means necessary, and if that meant free lodgings and fine dining, well—

  Put that way, why had he ever demurred? He really had turned into a hermit this last year and a half.

  When the young black woman in spectacles who’d shown him in reappeared, Lady Serena instructed her, without looking at him and without any more sarcasm than seemed present in everything she said, to show him to the Stuart bedroom.

  “The Stuart bedroom?” he asked, following the girl down a narrow, low hallway back to the public part of the inn.

  “King Charles stayed here a lot, the one who was beheaded,” Sophy said. “Legend has it the future James the Second hid himself here for a spot, too, when he fled London before his father’s execution. That was long before her ladyship and monseigneur du Sacreval had anything to do with the place, obviously. It had a different name then.”

  “Monseigneur du Sacreval?”

  “Yes, sir. He came over during the Terror—his parents were slaughtered by their tenants.” She shrugged. “Likely deserved it. He went back to France to try to reclaim the title after Boney went to Elba, and we haven’t heard from him since, so the inn is Lady Serena’s now. It’s only fair. Most of the money was monseigneur’s, but all the head for trade was hers.”

  “Why didn’t they call it the Sacreval Arms?”

  “Why, sir, who cares about Frog noblemen? Half the people who come here have French chefs higher born than monseigneur. But anybody would like to be served by a marquess’s daughter, and that’s a fact. Cits and nobles alike.” She frowned. “They don’t see what it does to her. She didn’t always look like that.”

  Solomon thought he knew what she meant. Lady Serena looked—well, she looked perfect. Her face was a perfect oval, her nose razor-straight and patrician. Her mouth looked as if it had come out of a Greek anatomy textbook, and so did her figure. Solomon had almost been tempted to get out his tape measure and start looking for instances of the Golden Mean. Her coloring only added to the impression—pale skin, pale gray eyes and black lashes, and hair as black and heavy as Ethiops mineral. The only impurity was a small birthmark over her left brow, like a circle of brown velvet.

  But there had been something about the look on her face—something about the way she smiled without her eyes that said she wanted him to notice it; something that was polite and challenging, blank and vital all at once. She reminded him of a bead of mercury: bright and shining and gray, spellbinding and utterly impenetrable to the eye. No one got that way without a lot of practice.

  So yes, he thought he knew what Sophy meant by she didn’t always look like that, but he’d frequently found that playing dumb got better information. “What did she look like before? She could hardly have been more beautiful.”

  Sophy caught her breath. “Men are all alike! But even you would—you didn’t see her before. She used to have the most expressive eyes.”

  Solomon would have liked to see that. You didn’t see her before—before what? He was surprised by how much he wanted to know. But maybe if he knew, he’d understand how she could be so damn striking and yet he couldn’t remember where he’d seen her.

  Perhaps feeling she had said too much, Sophy pressed her lips together. “Here we are, sir. The Stuart bedroom.”

  A huge oak bed with far too many claret-colored hangings made the room look smaller than it was. A large portrait of King Charles I, “the one who was beheaded,” hung over the mantel.

  The sun blazed in through a wide leaded-glass window to the right of the bed; it illuminated gleaming oak paneling, claret-colored paper, a thick claret-colored carpet (probably Aubusson, Solomon thought glumly), and a carved oak fireplace. Diana took aim across the hearth at Orion, and between them a clock, set in Apollo’s sun chariot, showed the time and the phases of the moon. Midsized rubies twinkled at him from half a dozen places in the carving, though one or two had fallen out over the years—or maybe been prised out by enterprising tenants.

  On the wall to his right, a sturdy oak door was set in an ornate door frame. “Is that a dressing room?”

  “No, sir, that leads to Lady Serena’s room,” she answered without expression.

  He glanced at her in surprise.

  She shrugged. “This used to be monseigneur’s own room. It locks from her side, so don’t try to take advantage.” Solomon tried to look innocent. Since he’d instantly begun to speculate as to whether monseigneur had taken advantage, he probably wasn’t succeeding.

  All in all, the room was far grander than anything he’d ever not wanted to touch in case he got fingerprints on it. Charles’s headless body must be turning over in its grave at the idea of a Hathaway sleeping in its bed, and all because Lady Serena thought it was funny that he wasn’t a Jacobite.

  But he didn’t appear to have a choice, so after muttering, “At least no one will be able to tell if I spill claret on anything,” he resigned himself to the inevitable. If he got started right away, he could borrow Uncle Dewington’s coach and driver and have his laboratory transported here before dinner, maybe start work on a new dye. A gray, quicksilver sort of dye.

  Solomon stopped short in the doorway to the dining room. Surely that wasn’t—but yes, it was. Of course it was. Lord Smollett. The bane of his Cambridge career.

  “Welcome to the Ravenshaw Arms, my lord,” Lady Serena said graciously. “Your usual table is waiting for you.”

  “Thank you, m’dear,” said the all-too-familiar drawl. “You are an excellent hostess. Although I much preferred your other career.” Smollett guffawed. Solomon, gritting his teeth, considered going back to his room and locking the door.

  Lady Serena smiled blandly, but a tenseness in her jaw suggested her teeth were gritted, too. “As flattering as that is, I can’t say the same for myself.”

  “Now that’s not very flattering to me!” said Smollett. What did he mean by that? What had Lady Serena’s other career been? She didn’t so much as lift an eyebrow, but Solomon could almost hear her say, Exactly. He tried surreptitiously to attract her attention.

  But Smollett spotted him before she did. “Well, if it isn’t the Hatherdasher!” He strode purposefully toward his new prey. “Matching the upholstery, are you?”

  Solomon sighed. Some things never changed. “Why yes, I am, as a matter of fact. May I congratulate you on the cut of your coat, my lord? Weston’s, isn’t it? We have a new piqué jonquil waistcoat in the window that would go perfectly.”

  “Dash it all, Hathaway, you talk like a damn tradesman!” He paused to consider this. “Course, you are one. I might have known you wouldn’t be anyplace so dashing on your own account. A fellow like you hardly has hopes of slipping into the Siren’s bed.” He laughed again.

  Solomon leaned hopelessly against the door frame and gazed over the top of Smollett’s head. Hadn’t he had enough of this at school? Now he couldn’t even write to Elijah about it later and laugh.

  Luckily, Lady Serena apparently had had enough. “Oh, Solomon!” she called carelessly. “What the devil were you about, keeping me waiting all this time? I’d nearly given up on you. I saved that little table in the corner for us. Oh
, pardon me, my lord.” She brushed past Lord Smollett and, taking Solomon’s arm in a proprietary grip, tugged him in the direction she’d indicated.

  Solomon tried not to smile smugly at the expression on Smollett’s face. “Thank you,” he said when they were out of range. “Lord Smollett has a somewhat paralyzing effect on me.”

  “I believe he has that effect generally,” Lady Serena said, surprising him. She let go of his arm, rather to his regret, and sat down in the chair that faced the room without waiting for him to pull it out for her.

  “Yes, well, he gave me my Cambridge nickname. The—” He stopped.

  Her eyes crinkled. “The Hatherdasher, yes, I heard.”

  “You and everyone else in the room.”

  “Smollett came up with that? He must be cleverer than I gave him credit for.”

  “I mean, it’s a bit rich, coming from someone whose name originally meant ‘small head’!”

  Something very like a snort escaped Lady Serena. She’d seemed so intimidating at their first meeting, but maybe he’d just been nervous. Maybe she was an ordinary woman after all. “It did?” she asked.

  “Yes, I came across it once in an etymological text. I told him, but he and his friends just looked at each other and laughed. It was an utter rout.”

  “You can’t fight the Smolletts of this world on their own terms. But I find utter indifference works wonders.”

  “‘Forsake the foolish, and live.’ Yes, I know.” He ducked his head at her quizzical expression. “Proverbs Nine: Six. Sorry, I—the Proverbs were written by Solomon, you know, so I liked them when I was a boy.”

  “And you were the sort of boy who memorized things.”

  There was a smile in her dry voice, so he laughed instead of taking offense. “How did you guess? But forsaking the foolish—it’s easier said than done. You seemed rather nettled yourself when I came in.”

  She stiffened. “It takes a deal more than Lord Smollett to nettle me.”