But already the hot clutch of panic was closing in around her.
No. No, she would not be a girl who needed to be petted and cosseted and attended by others every minute of every day. She would not.
If he thought she could scale a six-foot wall, she could. She would. She would have courage, and take care of herself.
Claire abandoned all pretense to ladylike sophistication, and wadded up the muslin skirts of her silk-embroidered ball gown, hiking her petticoats and rucking the hems into her garters without care for the cost or fineness of the material.
Nothing mattered but that she get over that wall and find His Grace.
She gripped the gun as tight as she could in her fear-slick hand, and scrambled for a toe-hold in the ivy.
She made it halfway over, landing hard on her belly on the slightly rounded crest of the wall, but the force of her landing knocked the wind out of her.
Bloody heavens, but it had been a long time since she had scrambled over a wall. Only a few years ago she had eagerly followed her brothers on rambles around Downpark, the family’s country estate in Sussex, fording streams, climbing trees, and clambering over stiles.
But for the past four summers such meanderings had been replaced with harvest balls and tight laces. With proper deportment, and politeness.
With smiles for marquesses’ unworthy sons.
Smiles and proper deportment be damned—it was nearly impossible to scale a wall while wearing stays. And carrying a gun.
But the evening seemed to be one for impossibilities. And for courage.
“Why, Lady Claire. Whatever are you doing? Did you think I wasn’t coming back to get you?”
She twisted atop the wall to find His Grace of Fenmore with his arms stretched over his head, leaning on the top of the frame of the deviously silent, well-oiled gate. The pose made the linen of his shirt draw tight against the sinewy muscles of his forearms.
But it was his smile that pinned her to the wall—full across his face now, curving from one dimple to the other, making his chin look long and pointy and entirely boyish.
“Forgive me for taking too long in picking the lock. Not that I don’t excessively admire the view.” He was smiling and frowning all at the same time, as if she were a particularly puzzling thing he had just chanced to discover. “You look the veriest romping girl.”
Heat streaked across her cheeks. Claire attempted to yank her skirts down over her ankles. “That does not sound like a good thing.”
“But it is a very good thing. At least from my admittedly askew point of view.” His voice was low and off-kilter enough to insinuate itself inside her. But there was also something honest and just blunt enough in his tone to be boyish and somehow unthreatening.
She still felt quite silly on her ungainly perch atop the wall. “My point of view is not much sounder. Would you be so kind as to take this?” She held out the gun. “I’m as like to shoot myself as anyone else.”
He made a shallow bow, and put out his hand. “Of course” he said in that agreeably terse, obvious way of his. “My apologies. I am sorry I did not open the gate with more alacrity.”
But he did not look sorry. A slow curve slid across one side of his face—a smile full of complicit, confederate charm.
“I am also sorry I arrived too late. I would have liked to see you assay it. Though it seems to have ruined your pretty skirts.”
“Bother the skirts.” Thank goodness the darkness hid the flame in her face. “I hope you do not think I am so helpless and vain as all that.”
“No. Not vain. Not at all. You mistake me. Again, my apologies. You’ve done the job right, with no help from me.”
Something that had to be pride replaced the heat in Claire’s cheeks. “Thank you.”
But she waited until he had turned away before she slithered down the wall, and landed knee deep in overgrown grass. Her shoes, as well as her white muslin skirts, would certainly ruined beyond all repair.
Her mother was going to have her head.
Claire pushed the uncomfortable thought of mothers, and fathers as well, away, and set her skirts and petticoats to rights before she followed His Grace across the length of the overgrown garden, and down a short set of stairs to the low kitchen door.
He looked as if he were going to have to put poor Carter down again, so Claire hurried forward. “Shall I knock?”
That made him smile. “Shouldn’t think that’ll be necessary.”
And as if he had clapped his hands and said “Open sesame,” like Scheherazade’s tales, the door did open.
A creaking voice floated out of the dark interior. “Well, would ya look at what the cat drug in.”
A small, pixieish old fellow stuck his head out into the moonlight, and then quickly gestured them inside.
His Grace led the way, shifting Carter’s body sideways, so he might pass through the door. “Evening, Jinks.”
“Speak of the devil, and up he crops.” The little man’s accent was Irish, all fey dips and feints. “Look like yer coming back down in the world this evening, Tanner.”
“That I am,” His Grace admitted, with that same ironic, conspiratorial half-smile that he had just given Claire. “Looking in the low places for my friends.”
“Well, you’ve come to the right place and all.” The Irishman locked the bolts behind them. And then his sharp eyes found her. “Who is that there with ye?”
“A friend,” Fenmore said. “And a body.”
The little Irishman didn’t blink an eye. “Not much profit in either. What game’s afoot, now?”
“Don’t ken yet.” His Grace and the Irishman plunged down a dark hallway, and disappeared from view, but presently a lantern was turned up, and a growing halo of light revealed a spacious, well-scrubbed kitchen at the end of the corridor.
His Grace seemed to know his way around, and went immediately to the long deal table, where he carefully laid Carter out, like a queen upon a tomb at Westminster.
“We’ll be needing more glims, Jinks. And coffee. Strong and hot. And send for a surgeon.”
The Irishman hung a second lantern from the rack of pots above the table, and took a long look at the pale, inert body. “Left it too late for a sawbones, haven’t ye?”
“Send for him—Old Pervis, if you can get him—anyway. We’ll need his particular expertise. I’m wanting this one as tight and tied as Newgate.”
“Ah.” The little man’s eyes seemed to turn up like a lantern. “Murder is it? Ye thinkin’ to make someone dance for it?”
Claire could only vaguely follow the little man’s broguish cant, but the duke seemed to understand fully—he answered in his emphatic way, “Yes. I mean for the killer to hang.”
The Irishman proved himself to be curious about live women as well as dead—he turned his beady black eyes on Claire. “And ’oo’s she when she’s at ’ome? Quality at least—that much I can see. And what’s happened to ’er?”
Claire’s hand flew to her flushed face. She had almost forgotten.
But in the brighter light from the lamps, the injuries to her face must be much more apparent. And His Grace had said she was likely to bruise. And those friendly miscreants in the alley—advising her that the Tanner would treat her right in the end.
Did they think that he had done this to her? Did he think they thought that?
But His Grace’s level gaze steadied her. He said in his even, factual way, “She had a run in with a Beau Nasty, whose brains were in his ballocks.”
In the light from the lantern she was somehow astonished to discover Fenmore’s eyes were lighter—the dark blue-green of the deep sea. She had never noticed the vibrant color before when she was spying on him across ballrooms, or this evening, in the shelter of the dark.
Behind His Grace, Jinks’s face broke into a snide smile. “Serve him a thorough basting, did you?”
And out came that crooked, secret half smile, curving up one corner of His Grace’s mouth. “I might have done.”
>
“Ah.” The Irishman’s small eyes brightened and crinkled at the corners in amusement. “Like that, is it?”
“No.” The uncompromising tone slid back into His Grace’s voice like a bolt going home in a lock, all trace of the roguish tough banished from his voice. “The deceased was her maid. I’m helping her. And she’s helping me. Please get her a cold compress for her face. Then make the coffee. Then get Pervis.”
Jinks already seemed to have a cold, wet cloth in his hand, and was proffering it to her, but he was squinting over his pug nose at her, and shaking his head. “What you’ll want for that is a beeksteak.”
He clomped away toward what must be the larder, and came back a few moments later with a fresh-cut piece of red meat, which he slapped into her hand. “Put that up on yer face bone.”
Claire started to do as she was bid—because she always did as she was bid.
But there was something about the juxtaposition of the bloody red meat, and Maisy Carter all laid out as if on a slab, and the idea of what they might do to the poor girl next.
Claire’s stomach cramped in emphatic protest. “Thank you, Mr. Jinks, but I think I’ll just use the compress.”
The Irishman was having none of her. “Don’t be a stubborn mort,” he growled, and shoved her hand, and the beefsteak it held, up toward her face. “Best thing for it. You mark my word. An’ I know a thing or two about darklights.”
His Grace intervened. “That’ll be enough of that, Jinks. Fetch Pervis. Bribe the old sot if you have to, to get him out of bed. Away with yourself. Now.”
“Aye then, Tanner, I’ll go.” The man Jinks finally began to act the servant, though he winked at the duke as he went toward the stairs. “But I’ve a mind to do you one better.”
“If you’ve a mind, that’s the first I’ve heard of it,” Fenmore muttered in response.
But his attention had already turned from the departing Irishman’s guffaw of laughter to the still form stretched along the table.
He hung a third lantern on the iron rack over the table, and then His Grace wasted no more time, but straightaway set about his examination of the body, putting his face up indecently close, moving her bodice clothes to inspect poor Carter’s corpse in the most indecorous fashion.
Claire grew hot, and then cold when she realized that she was quite alone with his chilly, indecorous, off-putting version of His Grace of Fenmore and a corpse.
“Whose house is this?”
“Mine.” His Grace, straightened. “Apologies. I’ve forgotten myself—my manners—again. I’ve brought you to my house, so you’ll be safe.”
“Oh, thank you. But, I thought you lived in Green Park?”
Everyone knew Fenmore House loomed out over Piccadilly onto Green Park the same way His Grace loomed about the edges of ballrooms.
Indeed, the mental image of the man as a shuttered mansion had for years given Claire pleasure as she watched him not dance and not converse.
“Yes. But I keep the lease on this house as well. It was formerly the home of my sister and her husband. I like to keep it for her.”
“How thoughtful.”
Her mention of thoughtfulness seemed to have reminded him of how to achieve it. “Lady Claire, perhaps you would like to...” He looked around the homey kitchen, as if it might give him some suggestion or inspiration for what to do with her. “Perhaps you would like to...see to yourself?” He gestured to the kettle on the hob. “A cup of coffee or chocolate perhaps?”
“Yes, I would.” She would have crossed to the fire, but her glance was interrupted by the line of knives slotted into the rail of a dresser.
A new kind of dread sliced into her lungs.
“Are you—” She swallowed and made herself return his sharp regard, but her voice was losing ground with every word. “Are you going to cut her up?”
He followed her glance to the knives, and looked back at her face, softening his scowl. “No, I’m not an anatomist. But I have called for the surgeon, Pervis, who may need—”
He stopped himself at her instinctive and altogether involuntary little wail of distress. “I beg your pardon, Lady Claire. But it cannot be helped. Miss Carter is beyond pain and fright, but she is not beyond help.”
“And you mean to help her by poking and slicing at her so?”
His smile turned gentle. “Ah. I see it’s you who is not beyond pain and hurt. Please let your rather vivid imagination rest, Lady Claire. I mean you no harm.”
“It’s not just imagination. I read the newspapers.” They were full of gruesome tales of bodies being stolen or murdered, and sold to doctors and surgeons who studied corpses by dissection.
Her stomach twisted tighter at just the thought of it.
“So you do.” He acknowledged her with that curt, but oddly respectful nod. What a man of contradictions he was. “You needn’t fear dissection. It should be enough to make a close observation of Miss Carter’s more obvious injuries and bruises.”
“Injuries? You mean she is not dead?” Claire started around him, toward Maisy Carter’s pale, closed face.
“No.” He stopped Claire with a hand, light but unyielding. “I’m sorry. She is quite dead. I meant to say, ‘the injuries that led to her death.’”
“Oh.” She retreated, slowly. The slight pressure of his hand, the articulation of his fingers, spread against the thin material of her dress front, and his thumb, upright along the line of the hard busk in her stays, was strangely comforting. It were almost as if she wanted the contact to last as long as possible. “Then you’re certain now that she didn’t drown?”
She looked up at him to find His Grace slowly opening his eyes, as if he were awakening from a trance—thinking hard about poor Carter, no doubt.
“As certain as I can be without— Her lungs don’t appear to be full of water. I’ve depressed them—her lungs—and no water has come out of her mouth, nor froth. And she’d had something of an awful fight before hand.”
“A fight? How do you know?”
“Fingernails, broken—quite shredded at the end.”
He returned to his close inspection, taking out a small hand lens like the ones her mother’s jewelers used to judge the worth of the stones they presented to her.
“And there is some blood, and probably skin, beneath her nails—either her own blood, or if we’re lucky, it means she scratched her assaulter. But the broken nails means she clawed and scrabbled hard at something.”
He carefully raised one of Maisy’s lifeless hands up to show Claire. “Very hard. It would have hurt. But she did it anyway, either because she was beyond hurt, or because she was desperate.”
“I should think anyone would be desperate enough not to die.”
“Yes. Most times.” He looked at the hand, and then closed his eyes quickly, as if he had to take just that moment to come to a decision. “I think she knew what this man—and it was a man—look at the bruises, here, across her neck.”
And despite herself, despite her dread and her disgust and her fear, she did look, because he was showing her something she could see and understand.
And it seemed important, and right, and grown-up in an entirely un-cossetted way, that she do so. That she bear witness along with Fenmore.
“He crossed his thumbs here—these darker marks,” His Grace went on in his inexorably factual way, “—to crush down on her wind pipe and choke the life out of her.”
Though even as he described the injuries matter-of-factly, Claire could hear the rage—the clawing, impotent fury—rattling around behind his voice. And it calmed her.
It calmed her to know that there were men in the world who did not think like Lord Peter Rosing. Who did not think they could mistreat a girl just because she was a servant, or abuse a young woman and push her up against a hard brick wall just because she was not strong enough to stop them.
The Duke of Fenmore made her feel as if she had a friend. A good, reliable, capable friend. A friend who noticed a maid’s broken
fingernails, and knew the marks of strangulation.
What a very, very strange duke he was proving himself to be.
“Quite purposefully, do you mean? Not an accident?”
“Quite purposefully.” He looked up from under his brows at her. “There is no way her death could be an accident. Her eyes were open when I took her from the water. Meaning that they were open at the moment of her death, which was therefore likely not in the water. And her skirt is ripped. A vertical tear from the hem up. Which points the way to her being—”
A sound of distress echoed down into, rather than out of Claire’s chest despite her effort to stifle it. Or perhaps because of it. But it could not be helped.
Nor avoided, though His Grace tried to spare her feelings. “I beg your pardon, Lady Claire. I should not have said—”
“That she was likely raped?” She took a gulping gasp of a breath, and then one more. “There, I’ve said it. It is an ugly word and an uglier crime, but if it is what happened to Carter, it must be said. Just as you said it almost happened to me. Though I am lucky enough to be able to thank God you came when you did. Who knows if I might have ended up like poor Carter.”
“No.” His response was instantaneous. “You would not have.”
He said it to reassure her. But it was not the truth.
“Only thanks to you.”
The truth was that the duke had suspected Rosing would do exactly what he had been doing to her when His Grace intervened. Which was why His Grace had laid his bloody lordship out like an undertaker.
And in case she did not sound sufficiently grateful, she added, “For which I am, and will be eternally, thankful.”
“I don’t want your gratitude.”
His voice was sharp, and Claire retreated in the face of such incomprehensible heat, her determination withering a little under the rebuke. “I don’t... understand you.”
“No.” His voice was harsh—a rough exhalation. “I misspoke. I did not help you to earn your gratitude. Rather, I hoped to earn your trust.”
Oh. Trust.
After the Scandal Page 7
