He sat back,sanded the message, folded the paper into a small square, and sealed the lot with his ring.
10
MAY 5, 1828
OPENING OF ROYAL ACADEMY EXHIBITION
s
Julian had his carriage brought around for the relatively short trip to the Royal Academy in Somerset House on Piccadilly. Normally, he would have walked the scarce mile from Grosvenor Square, but tonight, the streets were still awash in mud from a downpour the day before. He hated the way his mistress, Maria, whined if she had to walk any further than a block or two in the ridiculously flimsy silk slippers she insisted on wearing everywhere, no matter the conditions of Mayfair streets.
The fiery Venetian had insisted practical pattens were too gauche for her to be seen wearing in public. When he’d pointed out they were, after all, only for wearing over and protecting her shoes in public, she’d shattered the most expensive thing to hand, an Etruscan vase worth a minor fortune. He’d learned to restrain his tendency to practicality around Maria.
However, the woman did appreciate fine art, music, and the opera, things most of the sweet young, tonnish women thrown onto the marriage mart during the previous season merely pretended to understand or, God forbid, enjoy.
He’d been surrounded by a veritable pack of virgins and their mothers when he’d attempted to find a wife the previous season. Most of the young women, many of them passably attractive, had been obviously miserable trying to engage in conversation with him. The experience had been so off-putting, he’d begun seriously considering the services of a professional match-maker.
Maria’s voluptuous figure and Italian accent had captivated him the night he’d spied her across the room in his favorite gaming hell. Later, her knowledge of early French literature and a passion for opera had sealed their arrangement.
His friend, Hugh Elliott, the Earl of Westfalia, had invested in the gaming establishment, possibly to prop up his own considerable gambling habit. The earl had turned carousing into a high art but actually was realizing quite a bit of profit from the venture.
After his friend’s first year in business, Julian had invested a sum of his own, and now they were secret partners. Julian had expanded his family brewery business to include imports of fine wines and Champagne through his former lover, French vineyard owner Amelie. He now supplied the earl’s establishment adjoining the infamous Goodrum’s Emporium of Pleasure on Duke Street. Although he’d deny it to the end of time, he’d also begun supplying the terrifying Captain El Goodrum with champagne.
He’d had no idea what to expect the first time he’d been introduced to Eleanor Goodrum. The earl had convinced him to do business with her and had arranged an informal meeting, per her specifications. She’d apparently sampled Julian’s champagne during a visit to the earl’s establishment and had demanded an introduction.
In spite of the many terrifying rumors about her disposition, she’d totally disarmed him, appearing in a frothy confection of a lavender gown and a hat trimmed with fresh roses from the orangery at her estate across Hampstead Heath. She was unusually tall and strikingly handsome rather than pretty, as was the current style favored by the leaders of theton.
Julian’s unexpected discovery of the delights of Champagne had happened quite serendipitously. He’d unrepentantly consumed more than a year of his life learning the intricacies of the production of Champagne after he’d met Amelie, heiress to a great vineyard in the northeast of France. She’d been a great deal older than Julian, but he’d fallen irrevocably in lust with the woman, only to fall even more in lust with the bounty of her grapes.
Near the end of his tour of the continent, he’d made a side trip to explore one of the Templars’ still standing Commanderies, which now served as a sort of rough, crumbling inn for travelers run by an ancient French order of monks. He’d become so absorbed in his studies of the artifacts and the building that he’d forgotten the time, and developed a powerful thirst.
When he’d inquired as to whether they stocked any wine there, the monks still maintaining the old structure had given him odd stares and solemnly directed him to Amelie’s vineyards near Passy-Grigny. There he’d embraced two great obsessions—Champagne and Amelie, although he still could not remember which came first.
The great ardor which had sprung up between an impressionable young man touring the continent on his own and a sensual older woman had cooled in time. However, their mutual passion for wine, and Champagne in particular, had turned into a lucrative business affair.
* * *
“Good evening, Mrs. Pepoli…”Wills Tindall let his glance linger a bit too long on the bounty Maria’s latest gown presented in full splendor. Julian dreaded the monthly bill from the woman’s modiste.
She feigned embarrassment and snapped open a fan, strategically covering the view, which caused the younger Tindall brother to lose the faculty of speech.
Julian intervened, urging his companions through the crowded main level room at Somerset House to the adjacent School of Painting. “Help me push our way through,” he pleaded. “We have to see Danby’s “Sixth Seal.”
Maria whirled on him. “Do you think to herd us like cattle? Do you not think there might be something in the main room I’d like to see?”
“You can see whatever you like, you can stand in the crowded main room to your heart’s content and try to make sense of all these portraits of boring peers.” He paused and caressed the tender part of her wrist between her glove and the garishly puffed sleeve of her latest gown. “As for me, I’m going to go gaze on Danby’s version of the end of the world.”
She gripped his arm through the layers of his jacket and linen shirt, and his veins beneath throbbed in anticipation of the attentions at which she was a master. Why had he imagined a group tramp through Somerset House was a better idea than spending the evening at home with Maria at her townhouse on Charles Street? Then he remembered his promise. Lord Rumsford had begged him to help “civilize” his sons before they descended into a life of total debauchery.
Once he was before the oversize oil, which dominated the room at six feet high and a bit more than eight feet wide, he’d nearly forgotten his old friends who lagged behind, talking to a group of other young bucks. He waved a hand in their direction, gesturing for the two of them to join him.
At his side, Maria murmured, “I’m going to go immerse myself in Turner’s ‘Bird-Cage,’” and then disappeared into the crowd in the maddening habit she had of slipping away when she was bored. He turned at a rude cough at his elbow. Ah, the evening was complete. Hugh Elliott, Earl of Westfalia, stood shaking with silent laughter. “She’s given you the slip again?”
“Why is it you always appear just when I least need you?”
“Since you appear determined to be the father confessor and savior for all the lost souls in Mayfair, it’s only fair I should serve as your avenging archangel.”
* * *
