Lord of the Masquerade by Erica Ridley

Chapter 4

On Monday afternoon, Unity wrangled her voluminous black curls into subdued twists and clothed herself in her finest day dress. She looked more like a governess than a society miss, but she wished to learn from the Duke of Lambley, not waltz with him.

How many masquerades would he permit her to attend? If she were lucky... maybe two. It was not at all ideal, but if one was the best she could negotiate, then it would have to do. She’d bring a reticule large enough to hold a journal and several pencils, and take note of absolutely everything.

Her confidence wavered.

She’d spent years observing her cousin’s operations before attempting to meddle, and months immersed in Sampson’s before daring to make changes. Did she really think a single night hosted by the Duke of Lambley would have the power to—

Yes. She did think. After all, she knew what a masquerade was. She had attended several at Vauxhall and elsewhere. All she was looking for was the special spark that made his so different.

It couldn’t just be the carnal assignations rumored to proliferate at his parties. London had plenty of brothels and street prostitutes and high class demimondaines for all tastes and pocketbooks. Nor was Lambley the only member of the beau monde to host a masquerade.

Of course, fine gentlemen weren’t supposed to host parties. There was meant to be a wife or a dowager or an aunt or a sister acting as hostess, to make the gathering respectable. But clearly the duke wasn’t too concerned with conforming to society’s expectations.

That was the only reason Unity might have a chance. She did not match Polite Society’s expectations. To them, she was the wrong color, the wrong class, the wrong everything. But to Lambley, who delighted in being unconventional...

One night. One invitation. It could happen.

When the hack drew up outside the duke’s grand residence, Unity froze with her gloved fingers against the smudged glass of the small window.

The house was enormous. Three stories tall, and wide enough to fit her cousin’s club and Sampson’s gambling parlor in each wing. What on earth did anyone do with that much house? He could turn the first two floors into a theatre and still have more living space than a normal person would know what to do with.

Perhaps that’s what he was doing. Masquerades were a sort of theatre. Costumes to wear, roles to play. She could not wait to see what the stage looked like up close.

Unity handed the driver a coin and scrambled out of the hackney, then immediately regretted having done so. A lady did not scramble. Not that she was likely to be confused for a lady, but nonetheless, she did not wish to create a poor impression. What if he had seen her ungainly leap to the cobbled street?

More importantly, how was this street so clean? Did he and his neighbors employ an army of sweepers to dust away every pebble and leaf and horse dropping before it could even land? Did shoe-shiners pop out of the shadows to buff individual cobblestones into gleaming perfection after each carriage passed?

She made her way up the gorgeous, trimmed path to the front door, pausing every few feet to gawk at the size and breadth of his home.

Only because she was staring slack-jawed and shameless did she see a figure step close enough to one of the enormous windows for his face to be bathed in sunlight.

Three seconds. Maybe four. But that was all it took to burn that patrician profile into Unity’s brain for the rest of time. He was not even the sort of man she liked, and she would no doubt dream of him every night for the next two months.

Tall and wide of shoulder, dressed in the first stare of fashion and all that other twaddle Unity didn’t care about. It should have made him indistinguishable from every other rich, indolent Town buck.

But that face. Those shameless wenches had told her he was attractive, but a mere word could not encapsulate the harsh beauty of his face.

The duke’s visage should not have been handsome at all. Pale, cruel, unyielding. The angles a touch too sharp, the jaw a touch too square... and yet, touching was indeed what she longed to do. Feel those harsh lines beneath her fingertips. The firm lips of his unsmiling mouth, the dark lashes framing eyes that...

He had been too far away to gauge their color. His expression had not been angry or pinched or brooding, but rather... calculating, perhaps. As though when he looked out of his window, he did not see luxurious homes on a fairy-tale-perfect street, but rather the next battle in a war. He was moving chess pieces in his mind, and London’s lords and ladies were his pawns.

Definitelynot an attractive look, she assured herself. He exuded coldness and power and control. A god, dispassionately surveying his creations, and deciding what to toy with next.

By the flutter in Unity’s pulse and the shallowness in her wispy breaths, she had no doubt every woman who crossed his threshold hoped to be the next morsel on the menu.

Indeed, this was the quickest reconnaissance mission she had ever attempted. She hadn’t even made it all the way to the front door, and already she knew exactly why the female half of his guests would strike any bargain required to be allowed through the door. Hell, even some of the male guests likely felt the same way.

The duke’s magnetism was the sort where you knew—you knew—he was bad for you in every sense, but it only made you want to press even closer. To be the one that haughty face turned towards, to be the butterfly pinned by those all-knowing eyes.

She swallowed and hastened up the path before she lost her nerve.

A butler opened the door.

Did she curtsey? She curtseyed. Why did she curtsey? Roger had a butler, and she never curtseyed for him. Then again, she’d felt as though they were of the same class. Servants and wards weren’t humans in the eyes of Roger.

Thisbutler, however. He didn’t seem like an employee at all. He seemed regal. A marble statue, like his master. Cold. Dispassionate. Waiting.

“Er,” Unity said. “I... came to see... the duke?”

“Have you an appointment?” the butler asked in a tone that implied they both knew she did not have an appointment.

Unity fought the urge to fidget, then went ahead and fidgeted. This was her best dress, her best bonnet. Was it the light brown of her skin? Or was “respectable governess” the mistake? Perhaps the duke had a personal policy never to meet with anyone who could be considered proper.

Or perhaps it was her extended gaping in the front garden that had given her away.

“I’ve no appointment.” She straightened her pelisse. “I’m here to beg just a moment of His Grace’s time. My name is—”

The butler held out his hand.

Unity stared at it. Was she supposed to shake it? Kiss it? Dance a reel?

The butler’s voice was impassive. “Your calling card, if you please.”

Her calling card. Of course. She would absolutely hand one over, if she’d ever had reason to own such a thing prior to this moment.

“If you could just... tell him...” She trailed off. It was clear that one did not “tell” His Grace anything. If she were meant to be here, she would have an appointment, and they both knew it.

The butler lowered his hand. “If there’s nothing else?”

“Nothing else,” Unity mumbled and turned away before he could close the door in her face.

Lambley had won this round, damn him. But the game had just started.

* * *

The following morning,Unity had the hackney driver drop her off two streets away. Today, she would not be strolling down the immaculate pavement like a country bumpkin on her first visit to the city. The front door was not the way in.

She was heading for the back.

Unity no longer looked out of place in the duke’s fancy neighborhood. With her black dress and her starched apron and the mobcap hiding her hair from view, she looked exactly like any number of servants staffing the huge households. On this street, people like her outnumbered people like him twenty-to-one.

Her mistake had been trying to approach him as an equal. She was not his equal. Not only wasn’t she a lady, she also wasn’t a member of the land-owning class, or the dreaded nouveau riche whose fortunes were made in the mills and manufactories.

Unity wasn’t only good at coaxing businesses to higher efficiency and value. She was damn good with a broom and a mop as well. Once she was hired on as a maid, she would be able to inspect every corner of the ballroom as closely as she liked without anyone blinking an eye.

Better yet, she would be invisible. She could stand an arm’s length from any given lord or lady without her presence registering in their minds at all. There could not be a better vantage point from which to conduct her research.

Then she would go back to Cheapside and open her masquerade club for the common folk once Sampson was in a position to be a founding investor. What had he said—six months? That was more than enough time to have every aspect of the Duke of Lambley’s weekly masquerades memorized.

Unity grinned to herself. She was close now. Her assembly rooms wouldn’t just be the joy of Cheapside. They’d be her future. The permanence she’d sought all her life. The income with which to secure it. The respect she’d longed for.

And it would be hers.

The moment her club was profitable enough to repay her debt to Sampson, she would do so. After that, no more partners. She wouldn’t need one. Unity was perfectly capable on her own. Yes, yes, all of her friends pestered her about when she planned to get married.

After she’d proven herself and secured her own future, she’d consider the idea. But not until that day... and perhaps never at all.

Once she was financially secure and fully independent, why bother ruining a good thing by taking a husband? If she wanted to share her bed from time to time, well, there were less permanent ways to find pleasure than giving up her freedom for a man.

She smoothed her spotless apron and knocked briskly at the servant’s entrance.

At once, a wigged footman opened the door. Unity frowned. She had been expecting a maid. Had this tall young man in blue-and-gold livery been stationed at the servants’ entrance like a butler? Or had he just been passing by?

She gave him her brightest smile. “May I speak to the housekeeper please? I’m here to enquire about a post.”

“There are no open posts,” the footman answered.

Unity blinked. No open posts? In a house of this size? There was always room for a maid to take over for this or that person who was ill or incompetent.

She kept her smile in place. “If I could just speak to Mrs...”

The footman arched a brow. “Do you have a card?”

Did she have a—no, she did not have a card! She wagered this sanctimonious footman didn’t have a bloody card either. What sort of maid wandered about printing calling cards that cost more than her monthly wages?

She hesitated. Did rich people have rich servants? Might Jane in the scullery have a crisp stack of embossed cards reading, “Jane, Scullery”? Was Unity completely out of her depth?

“I am sorry to have wasted your time,” she said tightly and turned away with a bit more flounce than was truly necessary.

Was this a house or a military compound? Surely there was some way to get inside.

Second round: Lambley.

But these were still opening moves. He had not won yet. She was still learning her opponent. Every man had his weakness.

All she had to do was find it.

* * *

It took three days—andthe aid of Rhoda, Mabel, and Gladys—to put together the pieces of her plan.

On Friday afternoon, she stepped out of a hackney and onto the duke’s pristine cobblestone street adorned in a stunning, low-cut crimson gown that would not have looked out of place in an Italian opera.

Possibly because it was part of the lead soprano’s wardrobe.

The sweeping, clinging satin and silk were also the sort of materials one might expect to find draped seductively about one of the many voluptuous demimondaines who plied their trade off stage and during intermissions.

She was through with proper comportment and attempts at honest labor. Her friends claimed all men were the same, and that the quickest way to their heart was by displaying one’s cleavage.

Unity didn’t want the duke’s cold, frivolous heart. She wanted one evening on the other side of this bloody door for a single, solitary masquerade.

This had to work.

The white-haired butler opened the front door and stared. Not at Unity’s face—which she’d altered slightly with cosmetics—but at her bosom, which was more outside of her bodice than in.

“M-may I...” he stammered.

She beamed at him, not that he was watching. “I’m here to see His Grace.”

He swallowed. “I... Do you...”

She opened a bejeweled reticule and dramatically produced the single gilded calling card she’d had printed just that morning, which read:

Miss Unity Thorne

Courtesan

The butler’swide blue eyes nearly rolled out of his pale head.

Didcourtesans carry calling cards? And if so, did they state their nocturnal profession? Who knew? Who cared? Despite the wildness of the duke’s weekly parties, Lambley was infamous for never bedding the same woman twice, and being agnostic to race or class. He had never bedded Unity—nor would he. But he was bound to want to try.

Heroically, the butler managed to drag his gaze from Unity’s over-plumped bosom up to her eyes. “Do you have an appointment with His Grace?”

“Trust me.” She winked. “He wants one.”

“One moment, please.” Clutching her card, the older man barely remembered to shut the door before dashing off to find his master.

If the butler recognized Unity—which was doubtful—he’d think her proper governess attire had been the costume. No respectable lady would show up dressed like this. Even the courtesans limited such flamboyant frippery to the dim light of starlit evenings and flickering chandeliers.

She’d considered using a false name, but the duke seemed the sort who might exhaustively investigate his guests prior to granting an invitation. He would not find a list of prior clients, but he would discover a woman who had simultaneously once been young and homeless. It would not take much imagination to presume she’d risen from poverty by selling her body, as so many had done.

Especially not with a calling card like that in his hand.

She was not one of the famous courtesans written about breathlessly in the society columns. The ones fought over by earls, dueled over by viscounts. The ones whose accessories and hair arrangements were copied by the same fine ladies who pretended not to know their aristocratic husbands spent their nights in the arms of a paid mistress.

The Duke of Lambley had no wife to lie to about his whereabouts to, and was well known for befriending fashionable demimondaines and inviting them to his masquerades. According to rumor, the more popular the courtesan, the more likely she might be chosen as one of Lambley’s infamous single-night affairs.

Unity had no intention of becoming a conquest, but she was not above offering her bosom as bait if it allowed her across the threshold. He would be more open to a working woman than to a highborn title-hunting debutante.

Presenting herself as a courtesan made Unity ineligible to be his duchess, which would also ease his mind about allowing her in. At worst, she was after a spot of fun and a bit of gold, not a trip to the altar. Exactly the sort of woman who would enjoy a hedonistic masquerade.

And she would indeed enjoy it! Every minute would bring her closer to her goals of financial security and full independence. That was, provided the duke cared to—

The door swung open wide and the butler gestured expansively. “If you’ll follow me, madam.”

Unity’s legs trembled. It was not yet checkmate, but this round had gone to her. She hoped.

Into the lair she went.