Lions and Lace Read Online Free PDF Page A

further.
    He stepped up to the table and touched the rim of a cobalt goblet. But when he looked down at it, something inside him must have snapped. He must have been reminded that this was a goblet that should have been raised in toast to his sister, not sitting unfilled at an empty table in a desolate room. Without warning, his rage overcame him. Abruptly he raised his ebony walking stick and smashed it down on the table, breaking crystal and china in its wake. The Limoges porcelain clattered to the marble floor, and the roses and lilies were ripped apart from the force of his blow. He moved down the table and took particular vengeance on the wine goblets, shattering them one by one like clay pigeons, his expression frighteningly calm and deliberate.
    When the last cobalt goblet was destroyed, the last piece of Limoges cracked beyond repair, the last pink tea rose lying limp upon the floor, Trevor straightened and stared down at his hand that clutched his walking stick. It dripped blood from a dozen tiny cuts, a casualty of his violence and the flying shards of glass. He looked down at the carmine spots on the damask tablecloth. They were like virgin's blood on bedsheets , a final metaphor for Mara's lost innocence. Tormented beyond salvation, vengeance burning in his dark eyes, Sheridan decided on his retaliation. He shouted for his butler.
    Whittaker arrived, his professional demeanor not shaken by the violent destruction of the dining table or the crunch of priceless crystal beneath his polished shoes. After all, he was an English butler, trained to remain above the master's tantrums.
    "What may I do for you, sir?" Whittaker bowed.
    "Get me this evening's guest list." Sheridan didn't even look at him, his gaze riveted vengefully on the shamrock topiaries.
    "Very good, sir. Thank you very much, sir." He bowed again and mechanically went to retrieve what the master desired, the smile on his aging lips the only hint that he was not as detached as he appeared. Whittaker, with his scrupulous British background, was, of course, very much a believer in the Mellenthorp Rules of Etiquette. But he knew what went on in his domain. He, like the rest of household, knew that Miss Mara was upstairs in her bedchamber crying her eyes out. So he carried out the master's request with even more efficiency than usual, for in spite of his skills at the gentle art of buttling , Whittaker still believed that there was indeed a time and a place for revenge. And that time had most certainly come.

 
3
     
    The Commodore Club was busy that noon. Old rich men sat in the library in burgundy leather chairs reading the latest edition of the Bankers' Magazine. Hopeful investors crowded around the ticker-tape machine next to the concierge, praying that silver or Erie stock would rise and thus pad their incomes.
    The Commodore Club was the watering hole for Wall Street, one of the few places where old money shook hands with new. Though the Knickerbocker society wives wouldn't dream of taking tea with those beneath their social position—even if those not of their set possessed five times their wealth—the Knickerbocker men, while in the Commodore Club, behaved by no such rules. They easily mingled with the nouveaux riches if only to gamble and increase their bank accounts. (After all, those Knickerbocker wives with all their rules and airs of superiority were quite a dull flock, and mistresses were getting expensive.) Even old William B. Astor himself consorted easily with the young and mighty of Wall Street. At the Commodore Club, he even asked to be called Backhouse because it was his middle name, but more importantly because Mrs. Astor, once they had been married, had asked him never to use it again. It reminded her of "all sorts of vulgarities."
    So the established and the interlopers alike took their cigars and brandy at the Commodore Club. They conversed about bulls and bears, but mostly they talked about the Predator. They discussed in infinite