price.’
Chapter Three
I t was Christmas Day, and all throughout the county, Christmas bells were ringing. Robert’s head was ringing, too, from too much strong drink the night before.
Charlotte hadn’t lied: the duchess did celebrate Christmas in the old style, complete with pipers piping, lords a-leaping, and mummers’ plays put on by grizzled locals with accents thick enough to cut up and serve as Christmas pudding. Robert hadn’t seen the partridge in the pear tree yet, but he was sure there had to be one somewhere. It was impossible to pass through a doorway without being attacked by dangling bits of mistletoe and roughly hacked pine boughs perched precariously on every plausible surface. The pungent scent made Robert’s stomach churn.
Long after the frozen revellers had returned from the woods, long after the Yule log had been ceremoniously dragged in and set alight, the mulled wine continued to flow. The ladies had said their good nights and retired; the duchess had thumped through on her way to her stately – and, one presumed, solitary – bed; and the younger and more dissolute had kicked back in the aptly named Red Room, dealing cards and knocking back whatever beverage came to hand. By eleven, poor Tommy had been all but horizontal, more out of his chair than in it. By midnight of the dawning of the day of the blessed Saviour’s birth, Martin Frobisher was puking out the window. An hour later, Lord Henry Innes passed out in front of the fire and had to be carried out by a pair of blank-faced footmen.
The Duke of Dovedale and Sir Francis Medmenham played cards.
By three in the morning, Robert had won fifty guineas and a tentative invitation to Medmenham. He would have preferred information to the invitation, but Medmenham was damnably tight-lipped about his little club, even after several decanters of port. Carefully calibrated questions elicited only a raised eyebrow and the unhelpful comment that only initiates were privy to the ‘inner mysteries.’
Medmenham, thought Robert irritably, was deriving altogether too much enjoyment from stringing him along.
Medmenham and Frobisher hadn’t been the only ones wearing the ruby rings with the lotus petals etched on the bezel. There had been the sullen gleam of a red stone on Lord Henry Innes’s finger as he collapsed before the fire. When Lord Frederick Staines had lifted his hymnal in church that morning, a red ring burnt on his finger like a little cauldron of condensed hellfire. It had become a morbid sort of game, picking out the rings, wondering who else was part of their secret society – and whether Wrothan lay at the heart of it, or merely a pack of debauched dandies reenacting the greatest hits of Sir Francis Dashwood and the Monks of Medmenham.
Robert rather hoped he could track down Wrothan without having to go through the mockery of an initiation ceremony into Medmenham’s little Hellfire Club. Whatever his father might have enjoyed, he really had very little interest in running around in a robe in a clammy cavern, bare-arsed, while dandies in masks gibbered what they fondly believed to be demonic incantations. There were better ways to spend an evening. Like being slowly flayed over a hot fire.
Tommy was being no help at all. He was too busy gazing longingly at the bright red head of one Miss Penelope Deveraux, as though she personally had taught the torches to burn bright.
He would have to see what he could get out of the other, less guarded members of the club. Lord Henry Innes was a type he recognised, a simple-minded brute with equally predictable appetites for wine and wenches. Not women, wenches. Innes had been quite explicit on that point. As he had explained before sprawling out on the hearth rug, he enjoyed the kind of gel one could get an arm around – none of them squealing milk-and-water young misses for him, although he supposed the mater would make him marry one of them sooner or later, eh, what?
Innes reminded
Chapter Three
I t was Christmas Day, and all throughout the county, Christmas bells were ringing. Robert’s head was ringing, too, from too much strong drink the night before.
Charlotte hadn’t lied: the duchess did celebrate Christmas in the old style, complete with pipers piping, lords a-leaping, and mummers’ plays put on by grizzled locals with accents thick enough to cut up and serve as Christmas pudding. Robert hadn’t seen the partridge in the pear tree yet, but he was sure there had to be one somewhere. It was impossible to pass through a doorway without being attacked by dangling bits of mistletoe and roughly hacked pine boughs perched precariously on every plausible surface. The pungent scent made Robert’s stomach churn.
Long after the frozen revellers had returned from the woods, long after the Yule log had been ceremoniously dragged in and set alight, the mulled wine continued to flow. The ladies had said their good nights and retired; the duchess had thumped through on her way to her stately – and, one presumed, solitary – bed; and the younger and more dissolute had kicked back in the aptly named Red Room, dealing cards and knocking back whatever beverage came to hand. By eleven, poor Tommy had been all but horizontal, more out of his chair than in it. By midnight of the dawning of the day of the blessed Saviour’s birth, Martin Frobisher was puking out the window. An hour later, Lord Henry Innes passed out in front of the fire and had to be carried out by a pair of blank-faced footmen.
The Duke of Dovedale and Sir Francis Medmenham played cards.
By three in the morning, Robert had won fifty guineas and a tentative invitation to Medmenham. He would have preferred information to the invitation, but Medmenham was damnably tight-lipped about his little club, even after several decanters of port. Carefully calibrated questions elicited only a raised eyebrow and the unhelpful comment that only initiates were privy to the ‘inner mysteries.’
Medmenham, thought Robert irritably, was deriving altogether too much enjoyment from stringing him along.
Medmenham and Frobisher hadn’t been the only ones wearing the ruby rings with the lotus petals etched on the bezel. There had been the sullen gleam of a red stone on Lord Henry Innes’s finger as he collapsed before the fire. When Lord Frederick Staines had lifted his hymnal in church that morning, a red ring burnt on his finger like a little cauldron of condensed hellfire. It had become a morbid sort of game, picking out the rings, wondering who else was part of their secret society – and whether Wrothan lay at the heart of it, or merely a pack of debauched dandies reenacting the greatest hits of Sir Francis Dashwood and the Monks of Medmenham.
Robert rather hoped he could track down Wrothan without having to go through the mockery of an initiation ceremony into Medmenham’s little Hellfire Club. Whatever his father might have enjoyed, he really had very little interest in running around in a robe in a clammy cavern, bare-arsed, while dandies in masks gibbered what they fondly believed to be demonic incantations. There were better ways to spend an evening. Like being slowly flayed over a hot fire.
Tommy was being no help at all. He was too busy gazing longingly at the bright red head of one Miss Penelope Deveraux, as though she personally had taught the torches to burn bright.
He would have to see what he could get out of the other, less guarded members of the club. Lord Henry Innes was a type he recognised, a simple-minded brute with equally predictable appetites for wine and wenches. Not women, wenches. Innes had been quite explicit on that point. As he had explained before sprawling out on the hearth rug, he enjoyed the kind of gel one could get an arm around – none of them squealing milk-and-water young misses for him, although he supposed the mater would make him marry one of them sooner or later, eh, what?
Innes reminded
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