The Courtship - Catherine Coulter [118]
“Laughter,” she said, giving her husband a wink. “A man can always seduce his wife with laughter.”
And that, Lord Beecham thought, was true enough. He looked over at Helen, standing next to Alexandra Sherbrooke. He didn’t even see Alexandra or the sublime dé colletage that displayed her beautiful bosom. No, he saw only his new wife. His wife. At the advanced age of thirty-three, he was at last a married man.
Helen Heatherington. The alliteration pleased him, tasted delicious on his tongue. She was more beautiful than a simple man deserved. She was dressed all in pale-yellow silk, yellow silk ribbons threaded through her hair. She wore a diamond necklace around her neck that he had given to her the day before and small diamond drops in her lovely ears. He simply couldn’t stop staring at her, and knowing, knowing all the way to his soul, that she was his and would be his forever. His wife, so tall and willowy and graceful, and strong as a bloody ox. He wondered, as he watched the two ladies talk, if they were exchanging more discipline recipes. He hoped that Alexandra was giving his new wife exciting new ideas. Probably so. He imagined that Douglas was hoping it was Helen giving Alexandra the new ideas. The ladies appeared to have very fertile imaginations, at least that was what Ryder had told him the previous week, a fatuous grin on his face. He’d said that Sophie was absolutely brimming with wicked notions, eager to test each one on him. The ladies had even brought Jack St. Cyre into the discipline fold. Gray would shortly be cross-eyed with pleasure. Sophie had announced that Ryder was always one to try something new, particularly if the something new promised to be administered with wicked abandon.
As for Gerard Yorke, all had gone smoothly in that quarter, thank all the heavenly forces involved. He had been found in a back alley down near the docks, stabbed, his possessions stolen. They had all discussed burying him and just forgetting him, but Lord Beecham knew that there would always be questions, sly looks, particularly since they had let the gossip rip through society that Gerard Yorke just might very well be alive and need to be found.
Lord Beecham had wanted no whispers that a man should not marry a widow if there was even the slightest chance that the husband were still hanging about somewhere. No, he had to be dead and there had to be a body. He wanted no questions, no doubts.
Well, Gerard Yorke had been found, and quickly. He was dead. Many had seen his body. Lord Beecham’s dearest Helen was indeed a widow. So all, thank God, was well.
Had Lord Beecham been responsible for his murder? Not many people even considered it a possibility, for which he was profoundly grateful. Douglas and Ryder and Gray St. Cyre had done a good deal of talking after Yorke had been found. Their reasoning had been this: After all, Lord Beecham could have simply killed him and buried him beneath an oak tree and no one would have been the wiser. He would not have left him in an alley where he would be found. That made no sense at all. And everyone in society agreed. Thieves and murderers abounded at the docks. It was one of these dreadful blackguards who had murdered poor Gerard Yorke.
But the death of his father, Sir John York, First Secretary of the Admiralty, shocked everyone. It was said that he was so saddened by his son’s murder, never even knowing that he had still been alive all these years and surviving in secret for reasons no one knew, that he killed himself. He put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Father and son were buried side by side, on the same day, by the bereaved and shocked Yorke family.
People spoke of nothing else but Sir John Yorke’s suicide for a full week. The parties involved said nothing at all.
Then people spoke of nothing else except the magic lamp for a full week.
People didn’t really speak all that much about the murder of Reverend Mathers, surely a good man, and it was a shame that someone stuck