Night of the Scoundrel

by Kelly Bowen

  She reached for his hand at her waist, her fingers tracing the thick band of scar tissue. “Yes,” she said. “My parents were the Comte and Comtesse de Chadonnet. In the absence of a son and anything that resembled a conventional upbringing, my father taught me about rapiers and politics, and my mother taught me about history, languages, and maths. What are these scars from?”

  He tried to yank his hand from hers but she held fast.

  A muscle was flexing in his jaw. “I was imprisoned for nine years.”

  She had heard harrowing stories about London prisons, Newgate in particular. That he had survived nine years in such conditions was as horrifying as it was astounding.

  “What happened to your family?” he asked.

  “They died.” An unwelcome pang of grief stabbed her. “What were you in prison for?”

  King tipped his head back, his eyes sliding from hers. He seemed to be gazing at something only he could see. “For trusting the wrong person,” he said finally.

  Adeline wanted to press him further but stopped herself, afraid that he would shut down completely. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. Because there is absolutely nothing in this world that can scare me any longer. I lived through hell and survived.” He cleared his throat. “How did your family die?”

  Her fingers traced the muscle of his forearms up to his elbow. There were other scars there too, pale white lines mixed with darker ones that suggested defensive wounds from blades. Adeline had a few herself. “My parents lost everything in the Revolution. Their Paris home, and the château and vineyards. They fled only with what they could carry. And me.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “Italy at first. Spain later. We moved around a great deal over the next decade, staying where we could, pretending to be people we weren’t. But my parents longed to return to Paris. When the nobility was revived with limited privileges in 1805, they immediately returned to reclaim their birthright. I went with them.” She stopped, struggling and unsure why. It had all happened so long ago. “They were killed two days later by a man shrieking, ‘Remember Robespierre, death to aristocrats.’ He shot both my parents in the middle of rue Saint-Honoré while we were walking to the market.”

  “Jesus. I hope he paid—”

  “He was never caught.”

  His forehead creased. “You never got justice.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “I never did.”

  “Is that why you do what you do?”

  “Maybe. Probably.” She bit her lip. “Yes,” she decided. She lay back down beside him, staring up at the ceiling. “I know what it feels like to have no one on your side. To feel lost and helpless and angry. I never got justice for my parents, but I could get it for others.”

  “That’s very—”

  “Selfish,” she finished for him. “It was selfish. It was easier to focus on others who were suffering so that grief didn’t consume me whole. It started with small things—writing appeals and petitions on behalf of those who couldn’t in exchange for food or clothing. Later, slightly bigger jobs like recovering a set of molds stolen from a chandler in exchange for payment. My…reputation grew from there, as did the gravity of the injustices I was tasked with addressing.”

  He shifted, moving his arm from behind her head to slide around her shoulders and pull her close. Her head came to rest against his chest.

  “And now?”

  Adeline listened to his heart beating steadily, his voice rumbling low. “Now it’s all I know.”

  “You can’t keep taking on everyone’s pain and making it yours, Adeline. That is too much to ask of one person. You can’t live like that.”

  “Secrets lose their power when they are shared. Grief loses its burden when it is shared.” She hated how defensive she sounded.

  “And whom have you shared your secrets with? Whom have you grieved your losses with?” he asked.

  You, she almost said. She hadn’t shared any of this with anyone outside of this tiny cocoon of candor. A tear slid down her cheek. Horrified, she wiped it away before it could fall.

  “How did you get out of prison?” she asked abruptly.

  His body tensed beside her. “I escaped. How did you come to learn how to survive in Litchfield alleys?”

  “The same way you did,” she said. “The hard way. My education was swift and brutal. I imagine the streets of Paris are not so different from the streets of London.”

  “But surely your parents would have had friends or family who would have—”

  “All dead or scattered in the Terror. At the time, raised on stories of the mobs and given what I witnessed, I believed it safer to simply disappear on the streets.” She paused. “How did you escape?”

  His hand tightened around her shoulder. “I trusted the right person. Still trust him.”

  “Was he a prisoner too?”

  “Yes. He saved my life. And I repaid that debt not so long ago.”

  “And now?”

  King’s chest rose and fell beneath her cheek. “Now he’s a duke.”

  Adeline played with a button of his shirt, her fingers circling the smooth edge. “I’m glad you have this duke.”

  “He’s not my duke.”

  “Will you trust me the way you trust your duke?”

  King reached over her and drew the coverlet across their bodies. “I am trusting you not to kill me in my sleep,” he said. “I’m trusting you not to steal the Rubens from my wall downstairs. And I’m trusting you not to give Smithers another apoplexy by filching his key again.”

  But I don’t trust you with my secrets, Adeline finished for him silently.

  “Will you let me come with you to the churchyard tomorrow?” she asked.

  “Go to sleep, Adeline,” he whispered, pressing a chaste kiss to the top of her head.

  And when Adeline woke the next morning, sunlight pouring through the windows, King was already gone.

  Chapter 10

  The sun was blinding in its brilliance against the snow.

  It wouldn’t last long, King knew, before the newly fallen ground cover surrendered to mangy patches of melted snow and ice. But for now, the churchyard looked a little bit as he imagined heaven might, every surface glistening with an unmarred mantle of dazzling white.

  There were a handful of people in the churchyard, including a small knot of mourners who were just now departing from a newly dug grave. Two men who had been sweeping the gravel paths stepped respectfully out of the way, though none of the mourners spared them a second glance.

  King walked through the rows of headstones, his boots leaving deep imprints. On some of the stones, the snow had obscured the inscriptions, but that didn’t matter. King came here often. He knew where he was going.

  He reached the northwest corner of the churchyard, the collection of Westerleigh headstones arranged in a neat row along the path. At the edge, the familiar stone with its sculpted angel rose from the ground.

  Evan Westerleigh

  Beloved Son

  1785–1798

  King knelt on one knee and set the small posy down atop the headstone, the brilliant yellow burst at the center of each flower ringed by white and then an ever-deepening amethyst. Against the snow, they were like a spray of gems.

  “Those are lovely,” a voice said behind him. “What are they?”

  King rose from where he had knelt, brushing the snow from his trousers. He knew that voice as well as he knew his own. It had delivered him from moments of overwhelming despair and kept hope alive during the nights that would not end.

  “Heartsease,” King replied. “In the Renaissance they represented remembrance, memory, and spiritualization. Evan always liked painting them.”

  Noah Ellery, the Duke of Ashland, joined him, a yellow hothouse rose twirling gently between his gloved fingers. Both men looked down at the headstone, neither speaking. The clatter of hooves and rattle of wheels echoed outside the churchyard from Jermyn Street and Piccadilly. Nearby, a you
ng boy’s voice rose, peddling the newest edition of a scandal sheet to pedestrians hurrying by.

  “I used to love winter,” King said idly, tucking his bare fingers into his sleeves. “I would find Evan on street corners or garden squares trying to paint the city under snow. I’d tease him because he could never quite finish before the snow melted if it was too warm, or his paints froze if it was too cold. At the time, I never understood his need to capture individual moments.” He nudged the snow with the toe of his boot. “Now I wish I could have just one of those moments back.”

  The duke was silent, listening with the same quiet intensity King had come to associate with the boy he had been in those first awful years and then later with the man he had become. Incarceration had not broken Ashland. Nor had it changed the inherent goodness that had always dwelled within him. King could not say the same of himself.

  “Would we have been friends?” King asked abruptly. “You and I? If we had not been cast into hell together?”

  “Why do you ask this now?” The duke touched a thorn on the rose’s stem.

  “Of late, I’ve reflected on lost moments, I suppose. Moments where a different choice, a different action, a different twist of fate would have changed everything.”

  Ashland looked down, once again turning the rose over in his fingers. “Yet all of those moments are gone. You can remember them or forget them, like them or hate them, but you cannot change them. Only the moments to come can be changed.”

  King exhaled, his breath a silvery cloud in the air. “Evan would have liked you. Neither of you ever said much, but when you did, it always seemed to be maddingly sensible.” He paused, tilting his walking stick so that the silver handle gleamed in the sunlight. “Why are you really here, Ashland?”

  “I think the better question is, Why are you?”

  “I’ve come to pay my respects.”

  “Hmm.” The rose in Ashland’s fingers stilled. With great care he bent and placed it on top of Evan’s grave next to the heartsease. His charcoal-colored coat stretched across his wide shoulders, his light blond hair falling over his eyes. Slowly he brushed away the snow clinging to the decorative scrolling engraved above Evan’s name.

  “Say what’s on your mind, Ashland,” King said wearily.

  The duke straightened, his green eyes regarding King. “What do you need?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I am a damned duke, King. And with that title comes a shocking degree of power. Power in places that even you do not have it, despite rumors to the contrary.”

  “Your point, Ashland?”

  “If you need something, ask. I do not wish to see you do anything rash.”

  King stared at the flowers on top of the stone, the snow sparkling like a mantle of tiny diamonds in the light. “Like kill a baron on the grounds of St James’s Church?”

  “Like kill a baron on the grounds of St James’s Church,” Ashland agreed.

  King reached the obvious conclusion. “Lady Angelique spoke to you.”

  “Lady Angelique spoke to my wife. And Elise spoke to me.”

  “How quaint. Did you all trade gossip over tea and cakes?”

  Ashland ignored his barb. “She seemed to think that you’ve hired a new assassin. A very beautiful, very clever assassin.”

  “She’s not an assassin. But yes, she is beautiful. And clever.”

  “She also seemed to be of the opinion that you are…rather taken with this particular assassin.”

  “Did you not hear me? She’s not an assassin.” King didn’t address the other part of Ashland’s comments. Mostly because he couldn’t deny it, and Noah Ellery would see right through him. He wasn’t taken, he was bewitched.

  “Is she here? In the churchyard?”

  “Yes.” King hadn’t seen her here, which meant only that. He would be deluding himself if he thought she was anywhere else. That knowledge, instead of being irritating, was like a soothing balm to his soul.

  “Did you ask Marstowe here to kill him?” Ashland asked. To his credit, he sounded merely curious. But then, Ashland had known his share of violence long before he had become a duke.

  “If I were to kill the man, I most certainly wouldn’t do it here with a half dozen witnesses.” He gestured at the bundled people scattered throughout the churchyard. “Though the convenient proximity of a burial ground does hold some appeal.”

  “So the men who have been sweeping the same stretch of pathway for the last quarter hour are not yours.”

  King glanced at the two men with the brooms. They were brothers, their features too similar to mark them as anything else. Both were wearing somber colors, nothing so rich nor so ragged as to draw attention. “No. Those are the Darling brothers. And they work for themselves.”

  “And who are the Darling brothers?”

  “Purveyors of fine medical specimens.”

  Ashland gave him a blank look.

  “Resurrection men. They sell to medical schools in Scotland. Edinburgh, generally. I have used their services on occasion. They are very good at making bodies vanish into thin air.”

  Ashland stared hard at King. King stared back.

  The duke cleared his throat. “That night you saved my life and killed—”

  “Credible deniability, Ashland.”

  “What?”

  “Credible deniability. A little something I learned from my assassin who is not an assassin. And it’s what I’m giving you here.”

  “Did you ask them here today?” the duke demanded. “Thinking that there would be a body you’d need to make vanish?”

  “We’ve already been over this, Ashland. No.”

  “King—”

  “I wish he had died.” King knocked the snow from the edge of the grave in a violent blizzard. “I wish the twisted fuck had died aboard that packet off the coast. He’s sick.” He pulled out his pocket watch, ignoring the way his fingers were white around its edges. “He’s also late.”

  Ashland merely clasped his hands behind his back. “Perhaps your assassin has already done her job.”

  “For the love of God, she’s not an assassin.”

  “Hmmm.” He unclasped his hands. “Did you find Marstowe’s money?”

  “My my, Lady Angelique really was effusive.”

  Ashland ignored that too. “Did you?”

  “Not yet.” King tucked his watch back into his pocket. “The rector swears he has no idea where it is. I believe him.”

  Ashland pinched the bridge of his nose. “Why?”

  “I suggested that he keep his mistress at a better address. Currently she lives in a hovel near the Dials. It’s a dangerous area. One never knows what may happen to an unsuspecting woman who travels alone at night to meet her paramour.”

  “You blackmailed him and threatened his mistress?”

  “I did nothing of the sort. I merely offered him some good advice. Free of charge, I might add.”

  “How could you possibly know he had a mistress?”

  “Because I generally don’t visit this churchyard during daylight hours. Neither does she.” He paused. “The rector did tell me, however, that the late baron called him to his house right before he died and offered him fifty pounds to take whatever measures were necessary to make sure that his family’s graves in the churchyard were not disturbed. Someone, it seemed, had disturbed the grave of the younger Westerleigh brother just before the old baron’s death.”

  “Resurrection men?” Ashland glanced at the Darling brothers.

  “No, grave robbers, more likely. Corpses need to be fresh for the medical folk.”

  The duke made a face. “Perhaps the money is truly gone.”

  “Tsk. Nothing is truly gone, Ashland. One just needs to know where to look. I think your wife might agree with me. She found you, after all.”

  “King—”

  “Go, Ashland. Go be a good husband and a good duke and do all the good things that I never have and never will.”

  “I could tak
e the matter to the courts—”

  “And risk exposing your secrets as well as mine? Not a chance, Ashland. I am not that selfish. I will handle this.”

  “Don’t do anything rash. Please.”

  “Do not worry,” King said. “When I do decide what it is I will do, it will most certainly not be rash.”

  Chapter 11

  King found Adeline sitting in the wide chair behind his desk, considering the depiction of Judith beheading Holofernes. That she had beaten him back to Helmsdale did not surprise him. He had stayed in that churchyard in front of Evan’s grave long after Ashland had departed. Long after it had become clear that Baron Marstowe was not going to appear.

  “There are locks on my doors,” King said for the second time.

  “Not good ones,” Adeline replied again without turning around. She was dressed in her black trousers and coat, her rapier sheathed at her side, her curved knife held absently in her hands. “Who painted this?”

  “Caravaggio.” A faint draft swirled through the study as he shut the door behind him. “I had the version Rubens painted but I sold it. I much prefer this one.”

  Adeline ran her fingers along the smooth surface of her knife. The light from a half dozen sconces that had been lit against the encroaching darkness danced off the steel. “Tell me, is Judith a good person?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Judith.” Adeline gestured at the painting with the tip of her knife. “Is she a good person?”

  “I don’t understand your question.”

  “Look at her. She is assassinating a general without remorse. She has his hair wrapped in her fist, his head wrenched back, and her blade deep across his throat. She displays neither revulsion nor fear, satisfaction nor pleasure. She merely looks…”