Little Coquette by Joan Smith Page B

out for a patron.”
    Beaumont tossed up his hands. “I don’t believe what I’m hearing. You’ve gone mad. You were bad enough as a prude!”
    Her gray eyes were frosty. “Thank you very much, Lord Beaumont. You were and are utterly hateful, thinking you know everything. I’ll have you know I found out more in a quarter of an hour from Sally than you have accomplished since we got here.”
    “I just arrived this minute!”
    “I mean here, in London. You had all yesterday afternoon and evening. All you found out was that Prissie’s last name was Shepherd. I have found out all sorts of things. Horrible things,” she said on a hiccoughing sob.
    “What? What have you learned? Good God! Sir John didn’t kill her!”
    “Of course not! I don’t mean that! I am convinced it was Dooley. Prissie was frightened of him. He said she owed him something—money, presumably. That’s what he’s been looking for here and at the inn.”
    “We already suspected that. What else did you learn?”
    “Prissie has a son, a little boy. She calls him Richie. He’s probably Papa’s son, although his care is left entirely up to his mama. She let her maid go to save money for Richie’s education.”
    “That ought to please you! You complained enough that your father was squandering money on her.”
    “It wasn’t the money!” she said at once. “It was . . . oh, other things. He never came home for my birthday or Mama’s. He let on he was too busy. He liked her better than us,” she said, and drew a handkerchief from her reticule. She brushed away her tears and blew her nose.
    “I’m sorry,” he said, and felt a pronounced desire to punch Sir John in the nose. He and his mama had attended a few of those birthday parties. He remembered Lydia rushing to the window with love beaming in her eyes every time a carriage arrived, in the vain hope that her father had come home after all. And he remembered the slump of her shoulders when it wasn’t Sir John, too. The lightskirt he could forgive, under the circumstances, but to ignore his own family was doing it too brown.
    “She visits—visited Richie every Sunday,” Lydia said, “and now she’ll never visit him again. It’s horrid! That poor little boy. And furthermore, you young gentlemen beat the lightskirts!” she said with a darkening eye. “And as soon as you see a prettier face, you jilt your mistresses. It is a shame and a disgrace what these poor girls have to put up with from you.”
    “I never beat a woman in my life.”
    “I wager you have jilted plenty!”
    “You don’t jilt a woman whose services you are buying. You give her her congé and a diamond bracelet, and often go to the trouble to find her a new patron as well.”
    “Trade her in on a new model, you mean, as if she were a carriage or a horse.”
    “She sells her wares to the highest bidder. It is not always the woman who is given her congé.”
    “Putting French words on it doesn’t change anything. You use those women who have nothing to sell but their bodies! Oh, I am almost sorry I ever came here, except that I—” She came to a stop. Perhaps she would not tell Beaumont about going to the Pantheon.
    He leapt on it. “What?” he asked at once.
    “Nothing. Just that I’ve learned all those things from Sally.” She turned away and began fiddling with the ribbons on her gown, as she used to do when trying to con him a decade ago.
    “You are a very bad liar, Lydia,” he said, examining her in exasperation. Yet that childish motion with the ribbons, and her real hurt, caused him a wince of pity.
    “So now it is a gentleman’s prerogative to change his mind, is it? Yesterday you told me I was good at deceit.”
    Yesterday she had acted like a woman. Today, she was suddenly a young girl again. Beaumont sat down wearily and put his face in his hands. He must have been mad to come here. What did any of this have to do with him? He had thought it might be amusing to follow up the case, and now