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“It’s Lyndale, isn’t it?” she asked. “Your home. It’s lovely.”
The coachman pulled the chaise to a stop at the entrance, and a proper butler emerged from the columned portico to usher them inside. Emily was conscious of a bustle of servants and a babble of tongues, not only English, but something else.
She admired the soaring, light-filled entrance hall and grand staircase. “My father will approve,” she said.
“Do you?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Come,” he said, his face sober.
He led the way, and they stepped into another room, as dark as the entry was light, its walls lined with crimson damask and hung with paintings, its velvet drapery pulled closed. A white wainscot ran around the base of the walls, but the whole impression was of gloom and suffering.
Beside her Lynley had gone quiet. She moved to examine the paintings on the nearest wall. In front of her were three saints undergoing martyrdom or agonizing distress—one shot with arrows, another fasting in the desert, a third fleeing persecution.
She glanced at him. He waved her on. She moved down the length of the impressively long room, looking up at saints and sinners in torment or exile, and she could not help but notice the flaw in Lady Silsden’s plan of moral instruction.
When she had dutifully completed her circuit of the room, examining every painting, and returned to Lynley, she could not hide a smile and a bit of impatience.
“Lynley,” she said, waving a hand to indicate the splendid collection of art, “was this your aunt’s idea of quelling your...natural instincts?”
He nodded. She took him by the hand and led him to stand in front of the first painting she’d examined. “That explains her failure then. How could she hope to repress your earthly desires while surrounding you with such a display of flesh? They’re all quite naked, you know.”
She tugged him by the neckcloth and pushed his jaw up to examine the first of the paintings. “Look at this fellow dressed only in his halo.” She pointed to the next one. “And that one, who seems to have got his neckcloth around his nether parts.”
She waited, watching as quick comprehension sprang up in his eyes. Then he let out a laugh, a great gust of joy released from long constraint. He picked her up and waltzed her madly around the great room in defiance of all the gloom and suffering on its walls.
When he set her on her feet again, breathless and trembling, she looked up into his happy gaze and reached up to touch his imperfect mouth—and chose the future.
“Lynley, I’m ready for you to get me out of my clothes. Now.”
Upstairs in another red-damasked room with a long-dead pope looking down on them from above a white marble mantel, they made a laughing ceremony of undressing each other and fell into the bed.
And Emily discovered that the paintings hardly told the full story of flesh, for one could only look at them, and it was necessary to touch. Touch they did, shyly at first, so that Emily might notice and record in her flesh the sensation of his hands on her breasts and the pull deep in her belly, then more boldly, her hands moving as freely as his, their flesh warm and slick and sliding together, sensations coming fast, like dozens of bells taking up a peal, setting the air trembling and quivering, until an urgent need she had never known left her open and clinging to him.
He held himself above her, and shifted so that his shaft slid across the entrance of her slick cleft. Emily lifted her hips to meet his. A shudder wracked them both.
“Now?” he asked.
She arched up to kiss him. “Lynley, my spy, my love. Know that I mean to seduce you every day of our married life.”
He laughed and together they broke that last of the barriers between them.
“You must remind me,” he said much later as they lay skin to skin, “to thank my aunt for a perfect education.”
* * * *
A fortnight after his return to London from his wedding trip, Lynley, with Phil at his side, tracked Barksted down at his club. Lord and Lady Ravenhurst had left town for their principle estate in the country, and the contradictory rumors about Lady Ravenhurst’s earlier absence from London had largely cancelled each other out. Everyone suspected an unhappy marriage and a lover, but with the announcement of Lynley’s marriage to Lady Emily Radstock, even those gentlemen inclined to bet on the identity of Lady Ravenhurst’s secret lover, would not take odds on Lynley.
The shah’s missing letters to his son had been restored to the Foreign Office. War with Russia had been averted. In custody and facing trial for treason, Walhouse had spoken quite openly about his activities. In exchange for his cooperation, he would not be hanged, but transported. Even Walhouse, however, did not know who remained of Malikov’s spy ring. Somewhere in London an enemy continued to look for the weak links in the Foreign Office’s handling of confidential information. Once wed, Lynley and his lady, for Emily Radstock would be his lady, would hunt spies together.
Lynley found the prospect of working with his bride energizing. She had promised to seduce him every night of their married life, and a certain green and peony damask sofa figured in his thoughts of how that seduction might proceed.
There was just one unfinished piece of business in what Goldsworthy was calling the Ravenhurst affair, and Lynley had come to the club to settle that purely personal score. Barksted had failed with Lady Ravenhurst. However disillusioned she might be, she had returned to her husband. But unless someone stopped him, Barksted would remain the kind of man who, like the Russian who had seduced Lynley’s mother, would use and discard a woman, pushing her farther down the path to ruin.
The interior of Barksted’s club was much like the coffee room of the Pantheon Club, with a high barrel ceiling, hanging chandeliers, and tall windows covered with velvet drapery. Unlike the Pantheon Club coffee room, however, the room at Barksted’s club was devoted to green baize gaming tables, which lined the wall under the windows.
At the second table Lynley found Barksted, a pile of winnings in front of him, a desperate young man slouched opposite, and three other players wearing looks of boredom or disgust. He knew none of the other men, but two of them nodded to Phil.
