The Purloined Heart (The Tyburn Trilogy) Read Online Free Page B

Castlereagh’s paranoia, my lad. One must maintain one’s perspective at all costs. I recommend a visit to your favorite house of civil reception. A cool tankard, a warm woman—   Voilà! An easy mind.” He left the exasperated baron on the doorstep and continued on his way.
    Mr. Jarrow might next have stopped by Gentleman Jackson’s Bond Street boxing saloon to exchange blows with the champion himself. He might have visited his clubs. He might even have returned home to deal with the extensive correspondence that his secretary separated into three stacks, the first to do with business, the second social invitations, the third invitations of a different sort, drenched with scent. Instead, he made his way to Brook Street, where his current inamorata resided in a brown-brick structure of three storeys, plus basement and garrets, embellished by three bays. The lady’s obliging spouse was seldom on the premises at this time of day.
    Angel was ushered into the drawing room, a pleasantly proportioned chamber overwhelmed by an exuberance of cow and lion heads, gazelle legs and crocodile feet. On a mahogany sideboard with a sectioned cellaret on one side and open shelves on the other, a pair of bronze and ormolu stork candlesticks flanked a plate of marzipan.
    He regarded a chair with snarling armrests. The ancient Egyptians believed worldly possessions could be useful in the afterlife. Angel wondered if the divine Daphne wanted her abominable furniture with her in the tomb.
    Contessa DeLuca swept smiling through the doorway, porcelain-skinned perfection with chestnut curls and big blue eyes, wafting toward him on a cloud of spotted muslin and flowery perfume. “Angel! What a marvelous surprise.” Daphne’s smile faltered as she noticed the hat her visitor held in one gloved hand. “You are not staying, then?”
    He glanced at the mahogany mantel clock. “Alas, I cannot. I have a question to ask you, pet.”
    She brightened. “Oh!”
    “Not that question, my dove. After all, you are married, are you not? Cast back your mind to the Burlington House masquerade.”
    Daphne didn’t know what her being married had to do with anything. She would have run off with Angel at the twitch of an eyelid .
    She did not say so. Daphne had learned this much in her almost twenty years: gentlemen did not yearn to discover a woman’s innermost thoughts. She arranged herself on a sofa that bore a startling resemblance to a hippopotamus; positioning herself so the thin fabric of her gown outlined bosom and thigh. “You know that I went as my namesake. Any number of gentlemen said I was fine as fivepence.”
    So she had been, a nymph draped with strategically placed laurel leaves. Angel joined her on the couch. “You could be nothing but incomparable, my precious. Did any of your acquaintances dress as Diana, the huntress?”
    “I saw a half-dozen Dianas! None of my friends are so dull. Julia went as an Italian peasant boy, and Harry her companion, and Polly a country housemaid.”
    Daphne continued to chatter. Angel waited until she ran out of breath. “Did you notice a pharaoh?”
    “No, but that doesn’t mean one wasn’t present.” Daphne treated him to her tinkling laugh. “I almost didn’t notice you! Julia asked if you wereavoiding me.”
    Julia, in Angel’s opinion, was a spiteful little cat. “I was avoiding not you, but your husband . He has the oddest notion that I might care to make him a loan. If not a pharaoh, did you notice anything else out of the ordinary?”
    Daphne’s mood was not improved by mention of the conte. “The most interesting thing I saw was you, stealing away, you rogue. Don’t bother telling you weren’t going to meet someone, because I know how you are.”
    Angel had made his effort on Castlereagh’s behalf, had discovered that his Diana was no courtesan —  which did not surprise him, her kiss having had it in more enthusiasm than expertise —  and now, having discovered nothing useful,