When she was growing up, the gardens had been her fairyland, a place to let her imagination roam. The stables, her adolescent refuge, as she was allowed to explore the countryside on horseback until the fields ran into the sea. The grand fireplace in the meager great hall was a warm corner of comfort, where she and her beloved father had huddled their heads together every winter over countless books and shut out the world.
Her father, lovely as he was, had been too low for high society, too gentle for the merchant class, too eccentric to fit in much of anywhere, but too wealthy to ignore. Her mother had died of scarlet fever before Mena could even walk, and Baron Phillip Houghton had protected and pampered his only daughter. Educated her like a man. Treated her like a treasure. And instilled a love of all things intellectual and agricultural.
When the St. Vincents purchased the stately manor of Grandfield bordering Birch Haven, the baron had seen a chance to save his only child from encroaching spinsterhood.
A disease had been eating at his bones, one he’d kept hidden from Philomena until he succumbed to it mere months after her marriage, leaving her alone in this world but for a cruel husband and his hateful family.
Now Birch Haven was gone. Her father, years dead. And there was no sunshine or warmth in this world.
The cold pierced Mena before consciousness fully returned, and she knew for a fact she was not in heaven. Even before she blinked open her eyes and saw the face of the devil calling her name, an eye patch affixed over a grim, scowling, but satirically handsome face.
“Don’t move, Lady Benchley,” the black-haired, black-eyed devil was saying as he tucked something around her shivering body, something with warmth in its heavy folds. His cloak, perhaps? “Don’t look,” he softly ordered.
There was a man yelling, not far from her. Mr. Burns? The voice made her skin crawl. Her face throbbed with pain. Screams of madness and cries of joy echoed from women among the chaos of authoritative male voices out in the hall.
A sickening crunch sounded, and despite the devil’s orders—despite her own dismay—Mena looked.
Mr. Burns dropped from the grip of a familiar auburn-haired mercenary. The orderly’s neck crooked at an impossible angle and his eyes stared sightlessly at the cold, white walls.
Mr. Burns had been terrified in his last moments, and Mena was glad of it.
“He shouldn’t have put his hands on you,” the killer stated in that toneless, stony way of his.
“Mr. Argent.” A fair-haired man in a perfectly pressed suit leaned into her cell from the doorway, his light brows drawn down his forehead with somewhat paternal disapproval. Though he couldn’t have been much older than either Dorian Blackwell or Christopher Argent. “Did you just murder that man?”
Argent toed at Burns’s limp shoulder, his chilling features a smooth, blank mask of innocence. “No, Chief Inspector Morley, I—found him like this.”
The chief inspector glanced from Christopher Argent down at Mena, his blue eyes full of compassion, and then to the devil crouched over her. The director of Scotland Yard was no idiot, and Mena could tell that he ascertained the situation within a matter of seconds.
“Blackwell?”
“Bastard must have slipped whilst accosting the lady.” Dorian Blackwell, the Blackheart of Ben More, shrugged as he touched gazes with Argent, and then slid his notice back to Morley.
A tense and silent conversation passed between the three men, and after a moment where even Mena forgot to breathe, the chief inspector dropped his shoulders and nodded. “I’ll send for a doctor for the viscountess,” he muttered through clenched teeth. “A real doctor, as I intend to see the one running this institution hanged.”
“I’ll dispense with this heap of rubbish.” Taking Burns by the ankle, Argent dragged the limp and dirty orderly away as though he weighed no more than a gunnysack.
Turning back to Mena, Dorian tilted his head so he was regarding her solely out of his good eye. “Stay still a while longer, Lady Benchley,” he said with a gentleness Mena hadn’t known such a villain capable of. “My wife, Lady Northwalk, is waiting in the carriage. Once the doctor says it’s all right to move you, we’re taking you away from here.”
Mena fainted again, this time from profound relief.
CHAPTER TWO
Hallucinations. Delusions. Waking dreams. All symptoms of absolute madness.
And yet every time Mena pinched herself, the pain didn’t wake her.
This was really happening.
She blinked rapidly against misty-eyed gratitude as she looked at the two women occupying their own chaise longues, enjoying their second day of watching Madame Sandrine and her efficient minions fit Mena with a new wardrobe. If she were to paint them as they were now, she’d name the work Seraphim and Seductress.
Farah Leigh Blackwell, Countess Northwalk, perched on Mena’s right, a study of feminine, angelic English gentility. Her ivory muslin and lace gown played with the few gold strands in her white-blond coiffure as she sipped tea from a delicate cup. One would never at all suppose that she was the wife of the most notorious Blackheart of Ben More, king of the London Underworld.
On Mena’s left, Millicent LeCour draped her scarlet-clad body across her chaise like a luscious libertine, twirling an ebony ringlet about her finger. She narrowed catlike midnight eyes in assessment and bit through a soft truffle, rolling it in her mouth with sensual enjoyment.
“I know you’re self-conscious about the breadth of your shoulders, dear, but if you roll them forward like you’re doing now, you convey submission and doubt. You’ve a lovely, statuesque figure and must use it to your advantage. Throw your shoulders back and roll them down from your neck, like you have angel wings you need to stow.” Unfolding her legs, Millie stood to demonstrate her instruction, her posture the very image of confidence and authority. “And another thing, keep your chin parallel to the floor. Look anywhere you must if you can’t meet someone’s eye, but whatever you do, don’t drop your chin.”
Lessons in comportment from the most famous actress on the London stage; Mena could scarce believe it. She did her best to imitate Millie’s posture of regal grace and checked her progress in the mirrors surrounding the dais upon which she stood.