Dukes Prefer Blondes

by Loretta Chase

  Oy! You!”

  Radford glanced toward the voice.

  A young male in fantastical lilac and gold livery jerked his head toward a passage near the shop window where Radford lounged.

  The boy had taken notice of him some minutes ago, but didn’t leave his post at the dressmakers’ shop door immediately. After he’d ushered in a lady, the footboy or porter or whatever he was casually crossed St. James’s Street, summoned Radford in this suave manner, and stepped into Crown and Scepter Court.

  Radford followed him into the narrow passage. He saw that from here the boy could keep an eye on Maison Noirot’s door and dart across the street, should he be needed.

  “Well, then, whatchyer want?” the lad said.

  Radford regarded the blinding livery for a moment. Then, “Jonesy,” he said. “That’s a clever disguise.”

  “It’s my clothes,” the boy said. “I got a job.”

  “Ah.”

  “And it ain’t Jonesy, neither. It’s Fenwick.” The boy’s eyes narrowed, daring Radford to laugh.

  “I heard something to that effect.” Though he advised others to hire detectives, Radford was quite a good one. His profession often required it. His nature demanded it. He was drawn to mysteries and puzzles the way other men were drawn to gaming or drink.

  He’d pursued the Fenwick riddle among his numerous contacts on the London streets.

  “The French dressmakers,” Radford said, nodding toward the shop opposite.

  “They stole me right off the street.” The boy leaned toward him, his face a picture of shocked innocence.

  “I heard it was off the back of a carriage, when you were trying to empty a gentleman’s pockets. That was stupid. And you were one of the few of that lot with a brain.”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Don’t tell it to me,” Radford said. “I haven’t time. I need to send a message to a female.” He explained.

  Fenwick stared at him for a moment, then went off into whoops. The hilarity lasted for some time.

  Radford waited.

  “You!” the boy said when he caught his breath.

  “It’s not—­” what you think, Radford very nearly said. He caught himself in time. What the boy thought was immaterial.

  “Yer barkin’ up the wrong tree, Raven,” the boy said. “All her gennelmen is nobs, mainly, and you can get in line behind the other five hundred and sixty.”

  “Yes, well, I’m cleverer than any of them.”

  Fenwick cogitated upon this, his expression skeptical.

  “It’s about the truant boy, Toby Coppy,” Radford said. “You do remember? You led her to me the other day.” He studied Fenwick’s face. “By the way, I notice the swelling has gone down.”

  “He looks worse’n me!”

  “Tilsley does look a good deal worse, and his bruises, unlike yours, don’t match his regalia.”

  Fenwick narrowed his eyes at him.

  “Your ensemble, I believe the dressmakers would call it,” Radford said.

  Fenwick looked down at his lilac and gold splendor. “They said I could pick what I wanted.”

  “And you wanted to look like Louis XIV,” Radford said.

  Fenwick’s brow knit. “I fink I know which one he was,” he said. “They been teaching me. I can read and write now. And I can do ands.”

  “Hands?” Radford said.

  “Ands,” Fenwick said more loudly, as if to a deaf person or foreigner. “What’s fourteen and six and six again? Twenty-­six. Ands!”

  “Ah. Well, then, what does sixpence and sixpence come to?”

  “Twelvepence. A bob!”

  “Exactly.” Radford took out a shilling. “Here it is, if you’re clever enough to smuggle a message to the lady.”

  Fenwick folded his arms and eyed the coin with disdain.

  “A shilling, you little thief,” Radford said. “That’s twelve times the going rate, and you know it.”

  “The other fellers pay me more,” the brat said.

  “I’m not the other fellows,” Radford said. “If you won’t do it, I’ll find another way, and you know I can.”

  Fenwick shrugged and started to exit the passage.

  Radford told himself to walk away. His was idle curiosity, no more, and he hadn’t time for it. He’d a new case to prepare for. He had to shield his parents from the accursed Bernard.

  Radford had his own life, and she wasn’t and never would be part of it.

  Her path would never have crossed his if not for a missing boy who by now was either permanently lost in the thieves’ kitchen or already a corpse.

  If he sought her out, she’d think he wanted to help. And her mission was futile. It wouldn’t turn out as she hoped. Boys went wrong all the time, and the best he could do was spare them the gallows. He didn’t always succeed.

  He would leave it alone, as he’d advised her to do.

  It was the only rational course of action.

  “Wait, you little brigand,” he said. “Here’s another shilling.”

  Chapter Three

  Such a place of filth, and tipsy jollity, and nocturnal rows, and squalid wretchedness, is no where to be found, except on “Saffron Hill” in the vicinity of Fleet Ditch, where a large portion of the indigenous poverty of the metropolis is congregated.

  —­Nathaniel Sheldon Wheaton, A Journal of a Residence During Several Months in London, 1830

  The following day

  The Milliners’ Society for the Education of Indigent Females stood in a row of narrow, grimy buildings not far from the Bow Street Police Office.

  The rear of the building looked out upon a cramped courtyard. Undersized and starved for light, this patch of ground strove, like the girls within, to be something better. Someone had created a facsimile of a garden under the stunted trees. Someone had swept every trace of debris from the ground. Only one lonely leaf marred its neat order, and that, Radford felt sure, would soon be dispatched. Here and there a pot of flowers brightened the gloom. A bench, whose paint had been refreshed within recent months, stood under one of the dingy trees.

  Head bowed, face in her hands, Bridget Coppy sat on the bench and wept.

  Lady Clara chose that moment to arrive.

  Actually, calling it an arrival was like calling the eruption of Vesuvius a fire.

  Her ladyship wore a pink explosion of embroidered organdy boasting the gigantic sleeves still, against all reason, in fashion. The dress revealed more of Lady Clara’s creamy neck than ladies usually displayed by day, and the satin handkerchief, edged in ruffled Valenciennes lace and looped rather than tied at the neckline, didn’t fully cover the indiscreet-­for-­day bits.

  Though no fashion connoisseur, Radford had an eye for detail. This and a quickly acquired fluency in the arcane language of dress had proved crucial in two burglaries, one fraud, and one assault with violence.

  This must explain why he noticed exactly how low from the shoulder the sleeve was cut, the size of the waist the belt encircled, the snugness of fit above the waist, and the amount of satiny skin, in inches, visible above the handkerchief’s loop.

  A rice straw hat topped off the lunacy. Blond lace framed the inside brim, where a pink bow fluttered near her right eye. On the outside, flowers, leaves, and sprigs leapt skyward from a bower of ribbons and bows, to add some ten inches to her height.

  None of this explained why the wan little garden seemed to perk up and brighten, nor did he choose to pursue the question.

  Bridget had jumped up from the bench and curtseyed the instant Lady Clara appeared. Now, though, as she took in her ladyship’s ensemble, her mouth fell open and only her gaze moved, up and down and all over the apparition in organdy. This stopped the waterworks, in any event, for which he was grateful.

  “Lady Clara,” he said. “You’re pun
ctual to the minute.” He didn’t take out his pocket watch. He had an accurate idea of time, especially when it was wasted. Of the last five and twenty minutes, all but four, by his measure, fell into that category.

  “I seem to be late,” she said with a glance at the red-­eyed Bridget. “But your message stipulated two o’clock.”

  “I wished to speak to Miss Coppy before you arrived,” he said. This would spare his having to listen to two females talking at the same time, which females invariably did. “As I supposed, she’s told me very little more than what you told me, but in thrice as many words, punctuated by tears.”

  Lady Clara surveyed the girl, who regained her senses sufficiently to wipe her eyes with the back of her hand.

  “It was Toby, your ladyship,” she said. “He come by last night. He was so horrid. It come into my mind when Mr. Radford was asking me questions.”

  Toby was still alive. Given this fact, and what Bridget had told him about an encounter with a nasty piece of work known as Chiver, Radford was beginning to formulate a theory, one he didn’t much like.

  Meanwhile, he was still trying to detach himself from the news that her ladyship had attacked one of the London underworld’s most feared young cutthroats with her horsewhip.

  “Are you sure you want to save him?” he said. “We might be able to retrieve him, but you can’t expect us to undo the corruption of his mind.”

  Bridget nodded. “He’s led easy enough, and once I have him home again and back in school—­”

  “He’s very likely to be led away again,” Radford said. Had the mother not been an inebriate, he would have had more hope. Not much more, admittedly.

  “If he does it again, I’ll wash my hands,” Bridget said. “But I know school’s hard for him, and he isn’t clever. I’ll try to get him a place as an apprentice. But if he won’t stick to it, there’s no more I can do.”

  “We’ll help you find a place for him,” Lady Clara said.

  “We?” Radford said.

  “Yes.” Her ladyship gave him a level look.

  He gave her one back, then said to Bridget, “You may return to your duties. I can report to Lady Clara more succinctly as a soloist.”

  Bridget looked blank.

  “It’s all right, Bridget,” Lady Clara said. “Do go in. But wipe your face properly first. You don’t want Matron wondering what Mr. Radford said to make you cry.”

  The girl found her already damp handkerchief, scrubbed her face with it, bobbed several confused curtseys at them, and finally left.

  “I did not make her cry,” Radford said. “She wanted no assistance in that regard. The ticklish part was getting her to tell the story in a logical manner.”

  Lady Clara gazed at him in the way of a patient teacher encumbered with a student of slow understanding. “She’s fifteen,” she said. “She’s barely educated. She doesn’t know Euclid from Eucharist. Where do you imagine she would have learned logic?”

  “One and one makes two,” he said. “She wouldn’t go from Whitechapel to Shoreditch by way of Bloomsbury. It doesn’t require a knowledge of geometry or Aristotle to understand the shortest distance between two points, whether it’s furlongs or words.”

  “Judging by the speech your honorable friend made in court yesterday, the concept isn’t clear even to university-­educated gentlemen.”

  “Right,” he said. “Why were you in court, by the way?”

  “I was trying not to get married,” she said.

  He was, momentarily, lost, in an unexpected flurry of emotions too confused for him to sort, let alone name. But he swiftly set aside his bewildered other self, his brain returned to work, and he said, “That would appear to be a brand-­new way to go about it. But if anybody would set the fashion, I reckon it would be Lady Clara Fairfax.”

  “You’ve been studying me,” she said.

  “You studied me,” he said.

  “Due diligence, do you call it?” she said. “You’re interesting. You were an interesting boy, I recollect. I had better walk about. Some of the girls will be watching at the windows, and the dress shows to best advantage in motion. I’m told they like to see me in my finery. It’s good for their morale.”

  While he was trying to digest interesting boy—­irritating was the more familiar adjective—­she began a slow circuit of the small courtyard.

  In motion, the dress did appear to great advantage, but he saw more than that. She changed the atmosphere.

  The effect of beauty, he told himself. ­People experienced strong feelings looking at a fine painting or hearing splendid music. His other self wanted to sit on the bench and drink her in. That, however, wouldn’t produce intelligent or useful results. The opposite, rather.

  And so he walked with her.

  “The Season is over,” she said. “Most of the other families have gone to their country places. But Parliament still sits, and Papa remains to the bitter end. And Mama needed time to recover from . . . some weddings that weren’t mine.”

  He glanced at her. Pink tinted her fine cheekbones.

  “Some of the gentlemen lingered, too,” she went on, “and now they’re proposing twice a week. I think it’s become the latest sport, proposing to Lady Clara Fairfax. And I know what you’re thinking.”

  “I doubt that,” he said. His other self decided the gentlemen ought all to be pitched out of windows.

  “But you don’t care what ­people think of you,” she said, “and so I won’t let myself care what you think of me—­that I’m shallow and vain and capricious—­”

  “That wasn’t what I was thinking,” he said.

  “No, you don’t think of me at all, and why should you?” she said.

  Gad, was she a simpleton, after all?

  “You have important things to do,” she said. “I know. Even Bridget has more important things to do than I. There she is, trying to make something of herself as well as her brother, who’s probably a hopeless cause. Yet she won’t give up. And there are those poor pauper children—­and their parents . . .” She clenched her expensively gloved hands. “It makes me wild to think of the injustice. I don’t know how you bear it. But you try to do something. You even somehow make a victory out of failure. And there am I—­alas, poor me—­running away from my beaux—­”

  “Straight into the Old Bailey,” he said. “So it was desperation that drove you there. I was vastly puzzled. Never would I have theorized anything to do with your lovers. Whose name, I understand, is Legion.”

  She looked up at him. “That’s why you summoned me today? You were curious why I was in court? It had nothing to do with Bridget? Are you completely insane?”

  “I’m less insane than most ­people, if by insane you mean irrational,” he said. “And it did have to do with Bridget, peripherally.”

  “But you don’t want my help.”

  “With what?” He studied her, his gaze going up to the mad garden on top of her head down to the toes of her pink half-­boots, once, twice, thrice. “As I recollect, you came to me for help. You didn’t set out on your own to find the tiresome boy.”

  “And I’m to do what?”

  He gave a dismissive wave. “Whatever it is ladies do.” He started away.

  She stamped her foot.

  He turned back and gazed at the pink-­clad foot. “You stamped your foot,” he said. “Like a spoiled child.”

  “I am a spoiled child, you insufferable man,” she said. “I am only trying to be a little less spoiled and to be of use to somebody.”

  “You’re of no use to me,” he said, ruthlessly beating back the other, arguing self. “I’m not overly scrupulous about using ­people when necessary, as anybody will tell you. And I should use you if there were any sense to it. But I will not enter Seven Dials or Whitechapel or wherever the wretched brat’s gone to ground, encumbered by a young lady—­and
not merely a young lady, but a peer’s daughter. You’d only be underfoot, and I should have to look out for you as well as myself. If you think I mean to complicate this asinine business needlessly, because you’re bored and too many men love you, then what small brain you might have once possessed has atrophied.”

  Clara wanted very much to strike him with her umbrella, but she hadn’t brought one, and Davis, who always did carry one, was inside, where she’d told her to remain.

  Furthermore, Clara knew he was right.

  She’d only be an encumbrance.

  How on earth had she thought she’d be of any use to him?

  This wasn’t the scrawny adolescent boy who might have broken his hand when he punched the lumpish bully for speaking offensively in her presence.

  Yes, even at not quite nine years old, she’d known what that was about. Trailing after three older brothers, she’d learned things, like what bubbies meant. She’d understood, too—­perhaps not then, but not long thereafter—­that if Harry or Clevedon had been about, they would have done what the Professor did. Probably more successfully, but that made his doing it all the more admirable.

  Now he was as big as Harry or Clevedon. And judging by the powerful physique whose contours the well-­tailored black coat and trousers outlined, he’d spent the intervening years exercising his body as much as his brain.

  She would not think about his physique. He was intolerably supercilious and conceited. She wished Harry had taught her more about fisticuffs. Fighting worked so well for males, old and young, never mind who was right or wrong. How she would enjoy giving Mr. Radford a Chancery suit on the nob!

  “I fail to see what’s thrown you into such a snit,” he said.

  “Snit!”

  “Do try to use your head,” he said. “What other means had I to talk to you? I don’t circulate among the haut ton. I could hardly appear at your door and hand a footman my card. Then your family would wonder how we’d become acquainted. Your disguises make it clear they don’t know what you’ve been up to.”

  She hadn’t dared tell even her sister-­in-­law Sophy, who could have helped her with the disguises. Sophy had married Harry, and Clara didn’t want to ask her to keep secrets from him.