Midnight Pleasures Read Free Page A

Recognized him as emperor. And now Selim is planning to exchange the title of sultan for emperor! His father must be turning in his grave.” Breksby considered whether to have more orange jelly. Better not. His waistcoats were already a trifle strained.
    He returned to the subject at hand. “It’s up to us to dazzle old Selim in return. Otherwise he’ll go hand in hand with Napoleon, the silly turnip, and declare war on England, no doubt about it. And how are we going to dazzle Selim?”
    He looked triumphantly at Lady Breksby, but after thirty years of marriage she knew a rhetorical question as well as the next person, and simply looked past him, trying to picture Mrs. Barnett’s roses more precisely. Did they have just a tinge of crimson inside?
    “We send over a prime piece of nobility. We dazzle ‘em with some of our homegrown near-royalty, that’s what.”
    Lady Breksby nodded dutifully. “That sounds wonderful, my dear,” she said.
    The result of this conversation, the fruit of the orange jelly, so to speak, was twofold. Lord Breksby sent out a series of beautifully inscribed notes that were carried around London by one of the king’s messengers, and Lady Breksby wrote a long letter to her sister, who still lived in the small village of Hogglesdon where they had grown up, asking her to please walk by Mrs. Barnett’s house and request the name of her roses.
    As it happened, Lord Breksby enjoyed the fruit of his idea rather more quickly than did Lady Breksby. Mrs. Barnett turned out (disappointingly) to have died, and her daughter couldn’t say what the roses were named. But the king’s messenger returned to the Ministry for Foreign Affairs triumphant, having found all five noblemen residing in their London town houses and available to meet Lord Breksby at his convenience.
    Alexander Foakes, the Earl of Sheffield and Downes, was the first to arrive at the ministry. Breksby looked up quickly as the elder Foakes twin was announced. Then he got up, holding his hand out affably. Sheffield was a prime exemplar of his, Breksby’s genius, to his mind. He’d sent Sheffield off to Italy a year or so ago on an entirely successful, and very delicate, mission.
    “Good afternoon, my lord,” he said. “How are your lovely wife and daughters?”
    “My family is very well,” Alex replied, sitting down. “Why did you summon me, Lord Breksby?” He fixed his black eyes on the foreign secretary.
    Breksby smiled genially. He was too old to be overset by an impetuous young man. Instead he sat back and templed his fingers. “I would rather wait until my small party is assembled,” he remarked. “But I hasten to tell you, my lord, that I did not ask you here to request that you undertake an assignment on behalf of the English government. No indeed. We hesitate to interfere in a man’s private life, once that man has children.”
    Alex rose a sardonic eyebrow. “Except when the government decides to press its citizens into the army.” He was referring to the practice of sweeping up men and shipping them off to war, willy-nilly.
    “Ah,” Breksby responded gently, “but we never press our nobility into service. We rely on the goodness of their hearts and their wish to aid their country.”
    Alex almost snorted, but restrained himself. Breksby was a wily old Machiavel whom it wouldn’t be prudent to antagonize.
    “Your presence here is not exactly superfluous, however,” Breksby continued. “I have a proposition for your brother.”
    “He may be interested,” Alex said, knowing well that Patrick would jump at the chance to travel. He had been back in England for only a year or so, and in Alex’s opinion, Patrick was nearly mad with boredom. Not to mention irritable as a cat ever since Sophie York had rejected his marriage proposal.
    “So I thought, so I thought,” Breksby murmured.
    “Where do you plan to send him?”
    “I was hoping that he would agree to travel to the Ottoman Empire during the coming