The next day, there was no word from Stephen by eleven, which was when Crane called on Leonora Hart.
Leo Callas had been a coltish fifteen-year-old when he’d first met her, nearly two decades ago. Her father had been a trader, her mother long dead. She had run wild in the Shanghai streets, trading halls and merchant palaces all her life, and could curse in English, Spanish and Shanghainese with as much fluency as any of the young men around her. At seventeen she had abruptly blossomed into beauty and, armed with her father’s fat purse, had been set to go to London and become a Success. Instead, to everyone’s astonishment except Lucien Vaudrey’s, she had at eighteen eloped with Tom Hart, a silk trader of forty-two years, dubious reputation, and no appeal at all to her father.
Lucien Vaudrey had been unsurprised because she had confided her elopement plans to him, and in fact he and Merrick had taken on the slightly unconventional groomsmen roles of overpowering the gatekeepers at the Callas compound to let Leo out that night.
He had played his part without hesitation, because Tom had been kind to him in a life that had been very bare of kindness, and because he was twenty-two and barely expected to last to twenty-three. By the time he was old enough that he might have regretted his role in such an obviously disastrous match, it had become clear that Tom and Leonora were two halves of a soul.
Tom Hart had died some eight years ago, of a heart attack. Leonora had been almost deranged with grief, starving herself, drinking too much, acting in a way that shocked even the least shockable.
There was no trace of that wild, crazed widow now, any more than of the tomboyish girl. Leonora Hart was a very lovely woman at thirty-four. She was tall and curvaceous, with rich black hair and striking brown eyes, high cheekbones, and skin dark enough to seem exotic without raising too many whispers about mixed parentage. She was wearing silk in a shade of dull orange that was a perfect foil for her autumnal eyes, beautiful, elegant, sophisticated. She looked wildly out of place in the conventionally overdecorated drawing room of her aunt’s house, where she had been staying for the last two months.
“Leo, darling, you look magnificent,” said Crane, sweeping her hand to his lips.
She pulled him into a hug. “You rotten aristo. First you become a peer, now you’re playing the gentleman. What’s next, Lady Crane and some chicks?”
“Good God, don’t say such things. Anyway, isn’t it you who’s nesting? Why did I not know about this?”
“Oh sweet heaven.” Leonora rolled her eyes. “I suppose you’ve seen The Times. I could have shaken Eadweard.”
“But you are engaged?”
“Yes. Well—we are, but it wasn’t supposed to come out yet.”
“Why on earth not?”
Leonora gestured to a pair of chairs and sat. She leaned in to him, and he mimicked her, knowing that the English cousins she lived with were far too respectable for her liking. He wasn’t surprised when Leonora spoke in Shanghainese.
“I like Eadweard very much. I want to marry him. I really do.” Leonora knitted her fingers together. “You understand why I married Jan Ahl, don’t you?”
“Because it was exactly a year after Tom died, and you’d been drunk for the best part of a week, and in bed with Ahl for much of that, and marrying him was one alternative to killing yourself, although not the best one.”
“I love you for your kindness, Lucien,” Leo said wryly. “But you do understand. Because you knew Tom, and you knew what we had, and you know how I grew up, and how things are back home. It’s not like that here.”
“That it isn’t.”
“And Eadweard’s not like Tom,” Leonora went on. “I don’t suppose I could love him if he was. He’s—he’s righteous. Do you know what I mean? He doesn’t lie. He has high standards and lives by them. He would never let me down, never do a dishonest thing.”
“You’re right. He’s not like Tom.”
“No.” Leo grinned reminiscently. “Tom was the most lawless man I ever knew. He always said he never let a friend down—”
“But sometimes people didn’t know they weren’t friends any more until it was too late.”
“Hah! Yes. And, I loved Tom, but I’m older now and I’ve been alone for so long and…Eadweard’s a truly good man, and I respect that. I don’t suppose you know what I mean about righteousness, but—”
“An honesty that’s basically untouchable. Someone who will break before he bows. There’s a sort of purity to it. Yes, I know the appeal.”
“Well,” Leo said. “That’s the problem.”
“Blaydon does know about Hart, doesn’t he?”
“Of course. That is, I haven’t gone into too much detail. He thinks Tom was a scoundrel just for eloping with me, so I certainly wouldn’t tell him about his business dealings.”
“And what does he think about Ahl?”
“I haven’t told him.”
Crane digested that for a moment. “You haven’t told your fiancé about your second husband.”
“No.”
“You have told him you had a second husband?”