slinking up the coast, or nimbly leaping ashore with purloined goods. There was nothing of subtlety in the man. He’d be hung with alacrity in no time if he were a smuggler.
“Hardy!” Delacorte whisper-barked behind his hand, pantomiming secrecy, even though they were completely alone. “Have one of these.”
He slipped his hand into his coat and withdrew, of all things . . .
. . . two cigars.
He wagged his eyebrows at Tristan by way of encouragement.
Tristan stared at them.
Slowly, wordlessly, Tristan accepted one.
Ran it beneath his nose.
The little hairs on the back of his neck prickled.
“You’ll love it, Hardy,” Delacorte enthused. “They taste like . . . a damp house made of chocolate and perhaps parsley or sage, in which two zebras have been fucking on a dirt floor.”
Tristan stared at him.
It might be the most profane thing he’d ever heard.
And he’d been a sailor.
But Delacorte had lit it and he was studying it pensively, even beatifically, as smoke wreathed him, his brow wrinkled a bit.
“No—lions fucking,” he amended, cheerfully. Satisfied with that conclusion, he sucked until the tip glowed. “And yet, it’s delicious, somehow. Most interesting thing I’ve ever smoked.”
This was why women wanted to segregate the men for a time. One just never knew what they were going to say or do. For the same reasons one oughtn’t to keep an ocelot for a pet. He’d heard of a French aristocrat who had tried that once. It had humped the family dog and eaten the cat.
And they were bound to talk about all the things they’d smoked, eventually, because men had those kinds of conversations.
“I must regretfully decline at the moment, Delacorte, but thank you. Where did you get these singular cigars?”
“Bought them at the apothecary up the road on Courtland Street a month ago. Said they’d get more in but never did. Now they’re selling them for ten pounds each. Ten pounds! I ask you.” He shook his head mournfully. “Who has that sort of money to spend on cigars?”
“Did the apothecary say from whom they’d purchased the cigars?”
“Didn’t ask, my good man. Was selling him exotic concoctions and I didn’t want to remind him of another vendor at that delicate juncture.”
“I understand.” He made a note to tell Massey to pay a visit to that apothecary.
“So what else have you smoked, Delacorte?”
“Oh, opium, just the once, just to see. I like my head clear, you see. All manner of herbs. As one does in my line of business. Testing the wares. I smoke nothing with any regularity, mind you, and I thank goodness for that. Weakens the mind. And other things, too, if you take my meaning!” He winked heartily.
“I take it.” At no point in the history of the world would someone be unable to take Delacorte’s meaning.
“What manner of business are you in, Delacorte?”
“I sell bits and medicinal bobs of herbs and treatments imported from all over the world to apothecaries and surgeons. Crushed test—er, parts of various exotic animals, some very potent herbs. Was me own idea, you see. Took a treatment in China once, worked a charm!”
It was just inside of legal, barely, Delacorte’s profession, but doctors and surgeons, as far as Tristan was concerned, often operated on a wing and a prayer half the time, anyhow, and he knew from experience that some Chinese herbs and the like were quite effective in healing or easing pain.
“Make a good living?”
Men could ask this sort of thing of other men, casually, over cigars.
“Oh, fair bit. Fair bit. I can afford the rates here at The Grand Palace on the Thames, and so far I believe I’ve made a good choice. The company is fine,” he said gallantly.
“I suppose it’s fortunate there’s no cursing jar in this particular room.”
“Ha ha oh ho, the jar!” He gave Tristan a friendly whump on the back and Tristan clamped his top and bottom molars together to keep from reflexively clipping Delacorte about the ears. “You see, Hardy, I don’t mind a rule or two. Keeps a man civilized, wouldn’t you say? They know we’re all heathens at heart, even Brummel, I’d warrant. I’d love a woman of my own to bellow at me ‘Stanton, knock the mud off your boots before you come in the house or I’ll take a rolling pin to ye!’ Wouldn’t you?”
“I can’t say that I’ve ever yearned for a woman to bellow at me, no.”
“Used to being the one giving the orders, eh?” Delacorte winked.
After a moment he said, “Yes.”
The tone and