The Last Hellion Read online

  Her mistress, twenty-eight-year-old Lydia Grenville, regarded Macgowan with similar dispassion. But then, oversetting Lydia wasn’t easy. Fair-haired and blue-eyed, a few inches under six feet tall, she was about as delicate as the average Valkyrie or Amazon, and her body, like those of the mythical warriors, was as strong and agile as her mind.

  When he slammed the object of his indignation down upon the desk, she calmly took it up. It was the latest edition of Bellweather’s Review. Like the previous issue, it had devoted several columns of the first page to attacking Lydia’s latest journalistic endeavor:

  Like her namesake, the Argus’s “Lady Grendel” has once again launched a noxious assault upon an unsuspecting public, spewing her poisonous fumes into an atmosphere already thick with her pollutions. Her victims, still reeling from previous assaults upon their sensibilities, are hurled once more into the very abyss of degradation whence uprises the reek of foul and tainted creatures—for one can scarcely title as human the vermin she’s made her subject—whose cacophony of self-pitying howls—for we cannot call these excretions language—the petticoated monster of the Argus…

  Here, Lydia stopped reading. “He has lost all control of the sentence,” she told Angus. “But one cannot sue for bad writing. Or for lack of originality. As I recall, the Edinburgh Review was the first to title me after the monster in Beowulf. At any rate, I do not believe anyone owns a patent on the name ‘Lady Grendel.’”

  “It’s a scurrilous attack!” he cried. “He all but calls you a bastard in the next to last paragraph, and insinuates that an investigation into your past would—would—”

  “‘Would doubtless explain the virago of the Argus’s otherwise unaccountable sympathy with an ancient profession whose bywords are disease and corruption,’” Lydia read aloud.

  “Libel!” Angus shouted, pounding his fist on the desk. The mastiff looked up again, uttered a deep canine sigh, then once more composed herself to sleep.

  “He merely implies that I have been a prostitute,” Lydia said. “Harriet Wilson was a harlot, yet her book sold very well. If she’d had Mr. Bellweather abusing her in print, I daresay she might have made a fortune. He and his fellows have certainly assisted ours. The previous issue of the Argus sold out within forty-eight hours. Today’s will be gone before tea time. Since the literary periodicals began attacking me, our circulation has tripled. Rather than sue Mr. Bellweather, you should write him a note of thanks, and encourage him to keep up the good work.”

  Angus flung himself into the chair behind his desk. “Bellweather has friends at Whitehall,” he grumbled. “And there’re some in the Home Office who aren’t exactly friendly to you.”

  Lydia was well aware that she had ruffled feathers in the Home Secretary’s circle. In the first of her two-part series on the plight of London’s younger prostitutes, she had hinted at the legalization of prostitution, which would enable the Crown to license and regulate the trade, as in Paris, for instance. Regulation, she had suggested, might at least help reduce the worst abuses.

  “Peel ought to thank me,” she said. “My suggestion stirred so much outrage that his proposal for a Metropolitan Police Force seems quite mild and sensible to the very same people who had been howling that it was a conspiracy to grind John Bull under tyranny’s heel.” She shrugged. “Tyranny, indeed. If we had a proper police force, that fiend might have been caught by now.”

  The fiend in question was Coralie Brees. In the six months since her arrival from the Continent, she had become notorious as the worst of London’s procuresses. In order to get her employees’ stories, Lydia had promised not to reveal the woman’s name—not that revealing the bawd’s identity would have aided the cause of justice. Eluding the authorities was a game with the whoremongers, and one at which they were highly skilled. They changed their names as often and as easily as Lydia’s father had done, to elude his creditors, and scurried like rats from one lair to the next. Small wonder Bow Street couldn’t keep track—and didn’t feel compelled to do so. According to some estimates, London had more than fifty thousand prostitutes, all too many under sixteen years old. Insofar as Lydia had been able to determine, none of Coralie’s girls was older than nineteen.

  “You’ve seen her, though,” Angus said, breaking into Lydia’s grim reflections. “Why didn’t you sic that black monster of yours on her?” He nodded toward the mastiff.

  “It’s no good taking the woman into custody when there’s no one brave enough to testify against her,” Lydia answered impatiently. “Unless the authorities catch her in the act—and she takes care they don’t—we’ve nothing to charge her with. No proof. No witnesses. There’s little Susan could do for us except maim or kill her.”

  Susan cocked one eye open at the mention of her name.

  “Since the dog would do so only at my command, I should be prosecuted for assault—or hanged for murder,” Lydia continued. “I had rather not be hanged on account of a filthy, sadistic bawd.”

  She returned Bellweather’s Review to her employer’s desk, then took out her pocket watch. It had belonged to her great uncle Stephen Grenville. He and his wife, Euphemia, had taken Lydia in when she was thirteen. They had died last autumn within hours of each other.

  Though Lydia had been fond of them, she could not miss the life she’d led with the feckless pair. While not morally corrupt—as her father had been—they had been shallow, unintelligent, disorganized, and afflicted with a virulent case of wanderlust. They were forever wanting to shake the dust of someplace from their feet long before dust could possibly have time to settle. The ground Lydia had covered with them reached from Lisbon in the West to Damascus in the East, and included the countries on the southern shores of the Mediterranean.

  Still, she told herself, she would not have an editor to fume at present, or jealous publishing rivals to make him fume, if not for that life.

  Something very near a smile curved her mouth as she recollected the journal she’d begun—in imitation of her late and dearly loved mama—on the day her father abandoned her to Ste and Effie’s incompetent care.

  At thirteen, Lydia had been nearly illiterate, and her diary rife with spelling atrocities and horrific crimes against grammar. But Quith, the Grenvilles’ manservant, had tutored her in history, geography, mathematics, and most important, literature. Quith was the one who’d encouraged her writing, and she’d repaid him as best she could.

  The money Ste had left her as a marriage portion, she’d converted into a pension for her mentor. It was no great sacrifice. A writing career, not marriage, was what she wanted. And so, free of all obligations for the first time in her life, Lydia had set out for London. She’d taken with her copies of the travel pieces she’d previously had published in a few English and Continental periodicals, and what remained of Ste and Effie’s “estate”: an assortment of bric-a-brac and trinkets and precious little coin.

  The pocket watch was all that remained of their belongings. Even after Angus had hired her, Lydia had not troubled to redeem the other items she’d pawned during those first bleak months in London. She preferred to spend her earnings on necessities. The latest such purchase was a cabriolet and a horse to pull it.

  She could afford the horse and carriage because she was earning more than satisfactory wages, far better than one might have reasonably expected. Certainly she’d expected to drudge for at least a year, writing for the newspapers, at a penny a line, accounts of fires, explosions, murders, and other accidents and disasters.

  Fate, though, had sent a piece of luck her way in early spring. Lydia had first entered the Argus’s offices when the magazine was on the brink of failure, and its editor, Macgowan, desperate enough to do anything—even hire a female—that offered a chance of survival.

  “Nearly half past two,” Lydia said, returning the watch to her skirt pocket and her mind to the present. “I had better go. I’m to meet Joe Purvis at Pearkes’s oyster house at three to look over the illustrations for the next chapter of the drat
ted story.”

  She moved away from the desk and started for the door.

  “It isn’t the blasted literary critics, but your ‘dratted story’ that’s made our fortune,” Angus said.

  The story in question was The Rose of Thebes, whose heroine’s adventures had been recounted in two-chapter installments in the biweekly Argus since May. Only she and Angus were aware that its author’s name, Mr. S. E. St. Bellair, was also a piece of fiction.

  Even Joe Purvis didn’t know that Lydia wrote the chapters he illustrated. Like everyone else, he believed the author was a reclusive bachelor. Never in his wildest dreams would he have imagined that Miss Grenville, the Argus’s most cynically hardheaded reporter, had created a single word of the wildly fanciful and convoluted tale.

  Lydia herself did not like being reminded. She paused and turned back toward Angus. “Romantic claptrap,” she said.

  “So it may be, but your fascinating claptrap is what hooked the readers—especially the ladies—in the first place, and it’s what brings them back begging for more. Damnation, you’ve even got me wriggling on your hook.” He rose and rounded the desk. “That clever girl, your Miranda—Mrs. Macgowan and I were talking about it, and my wife thinks the wicked, dashing fellow ought to come to his senses and—”

  “Angus, I proposed writing that idiotish story on two conditions,” Lydia said in a low, hard voice. “No meddling from you or anyone else was one condition. The other was absolute anonymity.” She bent a glacial blue stare upon him. “If the faintest hint gets about that I am the author of that sentimental swill, I shall hold you personally responsible. In which case, all contracts between us shall be null and void.” Her blue glare bore an alarming resemblance to one employed by certain members of the nobility, under which generations of their inferiors had quailed.

  Lionhearted Scotsman though he was, Macgowan cowered under the frigid look as any other inferior would, his countenance reddening. “Quite right, Grenville,” he said meekly. “Most indiscreet of me to speak of it here. The door is thick, but best to take no chances. You know I’m fully aware of my obligations to you and—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, don’t toady,” she snapped. “You pay me well enough.” She marched to the door. “Come, Susan.” The mastiff rose. Lydia took up the leash and opened the door. “Good day, Macgowan,” she said, then strode out the door without waiting for an answer.

  “Good day,” he said to her back and, “Your Majesty,” he added under his breath. “Bloody damned queen, she thinks she is—but the bitch can write, confound her.”

  There were a great many people in England at this moment who would agree that Miss Grenville could write. Many of them, however, would have maintained that Mr. S. E. St. Bellair could write even better.

  This was what Mr. Archibald Jaynes, valet to the Duke of Ainswood, was attempting to explain to his master.

  Jaynes didn’t look like a valet. Narrowly built and wiry, with beady black eyes sitting very close to his long, crooked—on account of being broken several times—nose, he looked more like the weasely sort of ruffian frequently encountered at horse races or boxing matches, taking bets.

  Jaynes himself would have hesitated to use the term “gentleman’s gentleman” on his own account. While, despite his unprepossessing features, he was exceedingly neat and elegant, his tall, handsome master was not what Jaynes would call a gentleman.

  The two men sat in the best—which was not saying much, in Mr. Jaynes’s opinion—dining room of the Alamode Beef House in Clare Court. The street, a narrow way off infamous Drury Lane, was hardly the most elegant in London, and the Alamode’s culinary productions were scarcely calculated to appeal to discriminating palates. All of which suited the duke admirably, for he was no more elegant or discriminating than the average savage, and probably less so, from what Jaynes had read of the aboriginal races.

  Having made short work of a tall heap of beef, His Grace had settled—or sprawled, was more like it—back in his chair and was watching a waiter replenish his tankard of ale.

  The duke’s chestnut hair, with which Jaynes had taken such pains only a short time earlier, had got raked into a tumbled disorder that declared it had never met comb or brush in its life. The neckcloth, once crisply starched and painstakingly knotted, with each crease formed at proper intervals and angles, had subsided into limp and rumpled disarray. As to the rest of His Grace’s garments: In a nutshell, they looked as though he’d slept in them, which was how they usually looked, no matter what one did, and, Really, I wonder why I bother, Jaynes was thinking.

  What he was saying was, “The ‘Rose of Thebes’ is the name given to a great ruby, which the heroine found some chapters ago when she was trapped in the pharaoh’s tomb with the snakes. It is an adventure story, you see, and all the rage since summer.”

  The waiter having departed, the duke turned his bored green gaze upon the copy of the Argus. It lay as yet unopened—and it was only through a phenomenal exercise of willpower that Jaynes had resisted opening it—upon the table.

  “That would explain why you hauled me from the house at dawn’s crack,” said His Grace. “And dragged me from one book shop to the next looking for it—and all of them thick with females. Mainly of the wrong sort,” he added, grimacing. “I’ve never seen so many dowds in so many jabbering clumps as I have this morning.”

  “It’s half past two,” Jaynes said. “You never saw the morning. As to the dawn, it was cracking when you finally staggered home. Moreover, I discerned several attractive young ladies among the crowds of what you so callously dismiss as ‘dowds.’ But then, if their faces aren’t thick with paint and their bosoms aren’t bursting from their bodices, they are invisible to you.”

  “Pity they aren’t inaudible as well,” his employer muttered. “Twittering and simpering lot of nitwits. And meanwhile ready to claw one another’s eyes out for—What is the curst thing?” He took up the magazine, glanced at the cover, and dropped it. “The Argus, indeed. ‘The Watchdog of London,’ it purports to be—as though the world is famished for more pontificating from Fleet Street.”

  “The Argus’s offices are in the Strand, not Fleet Street,” said Jaynes. “And it is refreshingly free of pontificating. Ever since Miss Grenville joined the staff, the publication has become more like what its subtitle claims. The Argus of mythology, you may recollect—”

  “I’d rather not recall my days in the schoolroom.” Ainswood reached for his tankard. “When it wasn’t Latin, it was Greek. When it wasn’t Greek, it was Latin. And when it wasn’t either, it was flogging.”

  “When it wasn’t drinking, gaming, and whoring,” Jaynes said under his breath. He ought to know, having entered Vere Mallory’s service when the latter was sixteen, and the dukedom apparently safe, with several Mallory males standing between him and the title. But they were gone now. With the death of the last, a boy of nine, nearly a year and a half ago, Jaynes’s employer had become the seventh Duke of Ainswood.

  Inheriting the title had not mended his character a whit. On the contrary, he had gone from bad to worse, thence to unspeakable.

  More audibly Jaynes said, “The Argus was reputed to possess a hundred eyes, you will recall. Its namesake’s aim is to contribute to a well-informed populace by observing unflinchingly and reporting upon the metropolis as though it had a hundred eyes. For instance, Miss Grenville’s article concerning the unfortunate young women—”

  “I thought there was only one,” said his master. “The addlepated chit who got herself trapped in the tomb with the snakes. Typical,” he sneered. “And some poor sod must gallop to milady’s rescue. Only to die of snakebite for his pains. If he’s lucky.”

  Thickhead, Jaynes thought. “I was not referring to Mr. St. Bellair’s story,” he said. “Whose heroine, for your information, escaped the tomb with no outside assistance. However, I was speaking of—”

  “Don’t tell me—she talked the snakes to death.” Ainswood hoisted the ale tankard to his lips and empt
ied it.

  “I was speaking of Miss Grenville’s work,” Jaynes said. “Her articles and essays are exceedingly popular with the ladies.”

  “God save us from bluestockings. You know what their trouble is, don’t you, Jaynes? Due to not getting pumped regular, females take the oddest fancies, such as imagining they can think.” The duke wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  He was a barbarian, that’s what he was, Jaynes thought. His Grace belonged among the Vandal hordes that had once sacked Rome. As to his views of women, those had rapidly regressed to antediluvian since his elevation to the title.

  “Not all women are witless,” the valet persisted. “If you would take the trouble to become acquainted with women of your own class, rather than illiterate whores—”

  “The whores give me the only thing I want from a female, and don’t expect anything from me but the fee. I can’t think of one good reason to bother with the other kind.”

  “One good reason is, you’ll never get yourself a proper duchess if you refuse to come within a mile of a respectable female.”

  The duke set down his mug. “Devil take you, are you going to start that again?”

  “You’ll be four and thirty in four months,” said Jaynes. “At the rate you’ve been going lately, your chances of seeing that birthday are approximately nil. There is the title to consider, and its responsibilities, the foremost of which is to get an heir.”

  Ainswood pushed away from the table and rose. “Why the devil should I consider the title? It never considered me.” He snatched up his hat and gloves. “It should have stayed where it was and let me alone, but no, it wouldn’t, would it? It had to keep creeping on toward me, one confounded funeral after another. Well, I say let it go on creeping after they plant me with the others. Then it can hang itself on some other poor sod’s neck, like the bleeding damned albatross it is.”