Лорен Уиллиг - The Temptation of the Night Jasmine

“I needn’t ask what that is,” said Medmenham, with casual scorn. “Freddy always was too dim to know which tit to nurse from.”

Robert raised an urbane eyebrow. “So you’re friends, then.”

Medmenham’s lips quirked in appreciation. “Old Freddy has his redeeming points.”

“Such as?”

“A talent for collecting . . . interesting people.” A red ring glinted on Medmenham’s gloved hand as he lifted his handkerchief delicately to his nose. It looked, thought Robert, uncommonly like the ring he had noticed on Frobisher’s hand as well. “And a perpetually open purse.”

“A useful person to know.” What had seemed like mere scratches on Frobisher’s ring were more deeply etched on Medmenham’s. The incised lines took up the entire surface of the stone, curving in a series of overlapping curlicues. When seen right side up, the whole came together as a stylized flower that Robert recognized from thousands of temple carvings. One could scarcely go anywhere in India without seeing the representation of a lotus.

It was not, however, a flower generally favored for pictorial purposes in England, at least not that he could ever recall. The only recollection he had of the lotus flower prior to India was classical in origin, the island of the Lotus Eaters in Homer’s Odyssey, where the inhabitants dreamt their days chewing on the opiate leaves of the lotus.

“I shouldn’t think you would be wanting for blunt.” Medmenham ran an appraising eye over the huge urns that towered along the roofline of the jutting wings of Girdings. “How many tenants do you have?”

Robert supposed he must have tenants, but it wasn’t an item with which he had acquainted himself. He had made a point of never taking any income from the estates that accident had tossed his way. They were not, as far as he was concerned, really his. But that certainly wasn’t something he was going to share with Medmenham.

Instead, he shrugged, like any other bored young man of the world. “Who keeps count?”

It was obviously the right answer. The lotus ring glinted in another lazy pass through the air. “Who, indeed. Leave that to the estate agents. That’s what they’re there for. Why drudge away when there so many other pleasures to be had?”

“Why, indeed,” echoed Rob as the hazy outlines of a plan began to take shape. It couldn’t be coincidence that both Frobisher and Medmenham bore the same ring, or that Staines was reputed to collect “interesting people.” If one of those interesting people was the man Robert sought . . .

Rob’s pulse pounded in his ears as he said, with studied casualness, “If someone unfamiliar with the land were to wish to know more about such pleasures . . .”

“I believe that might be arranged,” said Medmenham. “For a price.”

In the torchlight, his eyes gleamed as red as his ring.

“There is always a price.”

It was Christmas Day, and all throughout the county, Christmas bells were ringing. Robert’s head was ringing, too, from too much strong drink the night before.

Charlotte hadn’t lied: The Duchess did celebrate Christmas in the, old style, complete with pipers piping, lords a-leaping, and mummers’ plays put on by grizzled locals with accents thick enough to cut up and serve as Christmas pudding. Robert hadn’t seen the partridge in the pear tree yet, but he was sure there had to be one somewhere. It was impossible to pass through a doorway without being attacked by dangling bits of mistletoe and roughly hacked pine boughs perched precariously on every plausible surface. The pungent scent made Robert’s stomach churn.

Long after the frozen revelers had returned from the woods, long after the Yule log had been ceremoniously dragged in and set alight, the mulled wine continued to flow. The ladies had said their good nights and retired; the Duchess had thumped through on her way to her stately — and, one presumed, solitary — bed; and the younger and more dissolute had kicked back in the aptly named Red Room, dealing cards and knocking back whatever beverage came to hand. By eleven, poor Tommy had been all but horizontal, more out of his chair than in it. By midnight of the dawning of the day of the blessed Savior’s birth, Martin Frobisher was puking out the window. An hour later, Lord Henry Innes passed out in front of the fire and had to be carried out by a pair of blank-faced footmen.

The Duke of Dovedale and Sir Francis Medmenham played cards.

By three in the morning, Robert had won fifty guineas and a tentative invitation to Medmenham. He would have preferred information to the invitation, but Medmenham was damnably tight-lipped about his little club, even after several decanters of port. Carefully calibrated questions elicited only a raised eyebrow and the unhelpful comment that only initiates were privy to the “inner mysteries.”

Medmenham, thought Robert irritably, was deriving altogether too much enjoyment from stringing him along.

Medmenham and Frobisher hadn’t been the only ones wearing the ruby rings with the lotus petals etched on the bezel. There had been the sullen gleam of a red stone on Lord Henry Innes’s finger as he collapsed before the fire. When Lord Frederick Staines had lifted his hymnal in church that morning, a red ring burned on his finger like a little cauldron of condensed hellfire. It had become a morbid sort of game, picking out the rings, wondering who else was part of their secret society — and whether Wrothan lay at the heart of it, or merely a pack of debauched dandies reenacting the greatest hits of Sir Francis Dashwood and the Monks of Medmenham.

Robert rather hoped he could track down Wrothan without having to go through the mockery of an initiation ceremony into Medmenham’s little Hellfire Club. Whatever his father might have enjoyed, he really had very little interest in running around in a robe in a clammy cavern, bare-arsed, while dandies in masks gibbered what they fondly believed to be demonic incantations. There were better ways to spend an evening. Like being slowly flayed over a hot fire.

Tommy was being no help at all. He was too busy gazing longingly at the bright red head of one Miss Penelope Deveraux, as though she personally had taught the torches to burn bright.

He would have to see what he could get out of the other, less guarded members of the club. Lord Henry Innes was a type he recognized, a simple-minded brute with equally predictable appetites for wine and wenches. Not women, wenches. Innes had been quite explicit on that point. As he had explained before sprawling out on the hearth rug, he enjoyed the kind of gel one could get an arm around — none of them squealing milk-and-water young misses for him, although he supposed the mater would make him marry one of them sooner or later, eh, what?

Innes reminded Robert tremendously of his father: an inebriate brawler, and all-around lout. The only thing noble about his father had been his name, and he had done everything possible to debase it. He had died as he had lived: in a brawl in a tavern.

Like his father, Innes had a certain rough charm that was nine-tenths bravado and one-tenth pure thuggishness. Plied with enough strong drink, away from Medmenham’s inhibiting presence, Innes would cheerfully tell him anything and everything he knew — presuming he knew anything at all.

As for Frobisher, there was a different kettle of eels, and just as slippery. Given the way Medmenham had quelled him the night before, Robert had no doubt that Medmenham held something over him, even if that something was only the threat of cutting off his access to their exclusive society — but he might be driven into admissions by his own desire to boast. With the right conditions, he might just be egged into bragging about their secret rites and what a very central part he played in them all. But would he know Wrothan?