“What do you mean by a ruse?” Annabel said, looking interested.

“A trick. A stratagem. The word covers a multitude of sins,” Josie said. “Every marriage that didn’t happen in a conventional way. Your marriage, for example. You married due to a scandal.”

“And mine, I suppose,” Tess put in. “Since I married Lucius after he engaged in just such a ruse to get Mayne out of the way.”

“Imogen’s second marriage was conventional—”

“In some ways,” Annabel said, laughing.

“But her first came about due to a ruse.”

“The evidence seems to be heavily weighted in favor of such strategems,” Tess pointed out. “I suggest that we approach Mayne and the question of marriage with that in mind.”

“Easier said than done,” Josie said. “Ruses are all very well if one is as delectable as the two of you. But I—”

“No more of that,” Tess said. “I agree with Annabel. If you want Mayne—and God knows, you’re the only one who seems to want him—then you shall have him.”

“I didn’t mean to encourage you,” Josie said, feeling alarmed. “Truly, I wouldn’t wish to marry in such a harum-scarum way. The fact that your marriage is a good one doesn’t mean that the end result will always be so favorable. I’d hate to take such a risk.”

“Even if it were to marry Mayne?” Annabel asked, with interest.

Josie opened her mouth and then hesitated.

“Our way is clear,” Annabel said to her sister.

“No,” Josie said despairingly. “No!”

“Watch us,” Annabel said.

29

From The Earl of Hellgate,

Chapter the Twentieth

Dearest Reader, you know me now as well as I know myself. And I’m sure you understand that as her passion for me sweetened, so did mine wane. Before long, I was no longer her faithful swain, and…ah, darling Hippolyta…forgive me. The tempests of our early relations were such that I could not be happy in the Paradise that you later offered me.

S miley had spent the last twenty years as Mr. Felton’s butler in town (a distinction necessary, he felt, to distinguish himself from Mr. Felton’s three other butlers, all of whom presided over establishments situated, regrettably for them, in the depths of the country). He was accustomed to a quiet life. After the master married, the household certainly became more lively, but the mistress was as calm as her husband. They did not keep late hours.

But tonight! Here it was ten of the clock, and Smiley was conscious of a faint feeling of resentment. First the Earl of Mayne brought the young Miss Essex to the house. Then the Earl of Ardmore and his wife arrived. They were family, of course, but Smiley felt that family had its place.It was time for him to retire to his snug little sitting room, where Mrs. Smiley would have a pan of hot water ready for his feet. Powerful trouble it was, standing on his feet all day long, and much of that on marble floors.

Not an iota of his thoughts showed on his face as he opened the front door yet again. “Your lordship,” he said, bowing to the Earl of Mayne.

“Smiley,” the earl said. “Would you be so good as to announce my arrival, and that of my uncle, the Bishop of Rochester?”

Smiley took the earl’s many-caped greatcoat and the bishop’s velvet cloak and ushered them into a sitting room. Suddenly his feet didn’t hurt as much as they had earlier. Could it be that his house was about to be party to a wedding?

What other reason could there be for tumbling a bishop out of his bed? Smiley opened the study door just as the Earl of Ardmore said something about kisses.

“The Earl of Mayne and the Bishop of Rochester,” Smiley intoned, with some satisfaction. So it was about kisses, was it? In his experience, there were kisses and kisses. The kind of kisses that led to a bishop appearing in the house at a late hour of the clock went along with a tumble…

He moved to the right of the door, doing a fine imitation of a marble statue. Sure enough, the Earl of Mayne launched into speech without waiting for him to leave.

“I’ve brought along my uncle—”

“Much to my disapprobation,” put in the bishop, who collapsed onto the sofa as if he were a marionette without strings.

“There’s only one solution to this disaster.”

“There is—” intoned the bishop but shut his mouth when his nephew flashed him a look.

Smiley would have closed his mouth as well. The normally pristine earl looked like a rough customer tonight. Like the kind of man one avoided down at the docks. His hair wasn’t an elegant tumble: it was pulled straight back from his forehead, as if he’d dragged it back with a hasty hand. His face was shadowed with beard, and there was a black circle around one of his eyes.

But it was really the set of his jaw and his shoulders that gave Smiley pause. Mayne looked like a man bent on murder, rather than marriage.

Yet marriage it was. Because Mayne was explaining that the bishop was there to marry him to Miss Essex. And no protests changed his mind, not even the bishop’s protests that he was supposed to marry people between the hours of eight A.M. and noon.

Mayne just turned around and gave his uncle a look from those shadowed eyes that would have befitted Beelzebub himself. “I suggest you pretend the sun is shining.” He said it softly, but Smiley, still standing by the open door, heard every word. “Because otherwise, I shall be forced to tell Mama.”

“Ah, your mother?” the bishop said with a gulp.

As it happened, Smiley knew about the Earl of Mayne’s mother. She was the abbess of one of the few nunneries left in England, and by all accounts, she was a powerful woman, who controlled hundreds of acres and had the ear of the Queen herself.

The prudent thing to do at this point would be to summon Mrs. Felton. After all, Mr. Felton wasn’t doing much more than stand there, rocking a bit on his heels with that quiet little smile of his. Which told Smiley nothing more than that the master thought the marriage wasn’t such a bad idea. The Earl of Ardmore was looking properly thunder-struck; those Scottish types were always a bit slow on the uptake, to Smiley’s mind.

He retreated into the hallway and sent a footman to fetch the mistress’s own maid, Gussie. Gussie’s eyes grew wide when she heard his terse statement. Two seconds later Mrs. Felton and her sister, the Countess of Ardmore, came flying down the stairs in a flutter of silk.

Smiley opened the study door again, but Mrs. Felton wasn’t nearly as imperceptive as her husband; she smiled at him in a way that said he should retire.

A good butler knows that a footman spinning champagne bottles in a vat of ice will chill the wine quickly.

The baize door closed with a slap behind him.

30

From The Earl of Hellgate,

Chapter the Twenty-first

The time had come for marriage. I steeled myself for the end of my amorous activities. From henceforth I would be confined to my wife’s bedchamber alone. Or so I told myself.

I f you would just summon Josie,” Mayne was saying again, trying to instill even the slightest bit of civility into his voice, “my uncle will perform this ceremony and the entire business will be over.”

“But Mayne,” Tess said, “while my sister and I certainly appreciate your gallantry, aren’t you engaged to be married to Sylvie de la Broderie?”Mayne’s jaw clenched. “Miss Broderie changed her mind. Earlier today,” he clarified.