Something that was surely relief was learning its tiptoeing way across her chest, easing air back into her lungs.
That was as it should be—everything he had done had earned her trust. “Yes.”
His openly intense gaze held hers a moment longer, but then, as if he thought he had said too much, he turned away, returning to the business of examining Carter to hide from her.
But in that one moment, Claire had seen beyond his cool, aloof demeanor to discover his needs—his own strange heart—was as fragile and vulnerable as her own.
And she didn’t know when she’d been as pleasantly shocked—a low sort of warmth kindled inside her, chasing away the aching cold.
“Thank you, sir. You do have my trust. I would not be here, with you now, if I did not trust you. And I trust you to do what’s right for Carter.”
She looked again at the state of the poor girl’s hands, one of which was clutched into a tight fist as the rigor of death began to settle upon her body. There must be thousands and thousands of girls like Maisy Carter—one for every house on this block, in block after block the length of London.
And there were another thousand girls just like her, Lady Claire Jellicoe, lined up like so much expensive cattle, ready enough to dance with the Lord Peter Rosings of their world.
Not all of them, nor many of the girls like Maisy Carter, had been as fortunate as Claire, to have such a savior and friend as the Duke of Fenmore.
Who was trying to defect her attention by asking another question. “Tell me again all you know about her. Everything you can remember of your conversations with Miss Carter.”
“She attended me yesterday and today—or should I say the day before yesterday and yesterday.”
Fenmore was nodding, but his hand was making an elegantly silent motion of encouragement. “What would you say was Miss Carter’s frame of mind? How would you characterize her?”
She said the first thing that came to mind. “She was a lovely girl. Skillful and perceptive.”
“What were her duties for you? When did she execute them?”
“She helped me dress. Did my hair and prepared my clothes and helped me—” There was no way she could possibly talk about such a closely personal subject as the intimate relationship between a woman and her lady’s maid. “She was a great help to me.”
“Do you know anything about Miss Carter’s background? Where she was from?”
“Don’t you know? She worked for your family.” Claire could hear the defensiveness in her voice.
“Riverchon Park is my grandmother’s dower house. I know little of its management, unfortunately. And I would have warned the staff to be on guard had I known Rosing would come.”
“Yes. But Rosing could have nothing to do with poor Maisy Carter.”
“That has yet to be established. I told you, I don’t believe in coincidence.” And there was the vehemence prowling through his voice. “Did Miss Carter ever mention his name to you?”
“No.” Claire shook her head, trying to understand this connection His Grace had already made.
His Grace was back over the table, leaning his weight on his hands as he looked closely at the body. “Did Miss Carter speak of any men?”
“Only the footman. I don’t remember his name. But I do remember she said she was ‘a good girl’ when I teased her about the fellow. He is the tall, dark-haired young man who attended in the drawing room—although I suppose they are all tall and dark haired; they’d never be hired otherwise. But when he passed us in the upper hallway, he was so obviously looking at her in the way—”
The words died away in Claire’s mouth. The soft, sweet, adoring look the young footman had sent after Maisy Carter was somehow too private, too intimate a thing to discuss with a man like His Strange Grace.
But for Maisy’s sake, she had to try.
“He looked at her in a nice way. As if he cared for her. But she said she was minding herself with her fellow, and meant to get ahead in her position, like her mam wanted her to. She said she was a good girl, and was grateful to work in such a lovely house. And ‘happy to have landed here out of the almonry,’ she said. But I’d no idea what an almonry was or what sort of work she did there.”
Picking the nuts from trees, she supposed.
His Grace put his head back, and drew in a long, contemplative breath before he spoke.
“The Almonry is a dirty, broken-down district of vile slum rooms unfit for habitation lying in the shadow of Westminster Cathedral. The Devil’s Acre, they call it. If she came from there, she was lucky to get out.”
Unfit for habitation in Westminster? God, but she was so bloody ignorant of the world. The world that existed less than a mile from her parents’ front door.
She had been to Westminster, to the vaulted, hallowed cathedral, and she had not known such a place as the Devil’s Acre existed. She had never noticed. “She’s not lucky now.”
“No.”
“And she does not look as if she were at peace, does she, with her hand all clenched up like that? She looks like she’s still fighting, still trying to pound some justice into someone with her small fist.”
“Yes, I had noticed— God’s balls.”
This time the duke didn’t even apologize for his oath—he was too busy looking at Maisy Carter with his head cocked to the side, twisting his neck and narrowing his eyes as he peered more intently at her hands. “I hadn’t noticed properly. Why hadn’t I seen that?”
“I don’t know,” Claire began, “perhaps—”
But it had been a rhetorical question—one he did not mean for her to answer—as he paid Claire no more attention, but squatted down until he was at eye level with Maisy Carter’s poor stiff fist.
“Ah,” he said, as he pried apart the lifeless fingers clutched tight with the rigor of death. He came away with some little thing. “What do we make of this?” he murmured.
She looked more closely at the items in his open palm. “A little scrap of fabric, and a coin?”
“More like a seal,” he corrected. “No. A coin set as a watch fob, I should reckon.”
Claire felt that she could not reckon nearly as swiftly as His Grace—she felt as if she were constantly playing the catch-up.
“I suppose she could she have found it some where—anywhere—whilst she might have been going about her duties. But holding it like that, while she was strangled… You’re going to tell me it’s not a coincidence, aren’t you?”
The Duke of Fenmore looked up at her with eyes that seemed a hundred years old, darkened with knowledge and pity.
“Yes, Lady Claire. There’s no such thing as coincidence.”
Chapter 6
Lady Claire really had no idea about the world. And why would she?
Until Lord Peter Rosing had put his filthy hands upon her, Lady Claire Jellicoe had never been touched by violence or vice, squalor or want. And an acquaintance of only a few hours time had not been sufficient to introduce her to the full depth and breadth of humanity’s faults and frailties.
Tanner hated to be the one to disillusion her.
It was different for him. He had known nothing but poverty and desperation as a child. They had been his constant companions—had taught him his stealth and guile.
But tonight he could only be glad of them. He could only be thankful that he had been stealthily watching her with Rosing, or it might have gone very, very much worse for Lady Claire Jellicoe—she might have ended up as dead as the maid.
Guile had also taught him that there was no such thing as coincidence—murder, like rape, was an awful, telling, lethal habit.
Tanner stood, and strove to keep his voice low and level, to keep anything that could frighten Lady Claire under strict control as he explained.
“She is clutching it on purpose, Lady Claire. She was a smart girl—clever and capable, you said. I think she tore this fabric”—he very carefully extracted the little scrap of material, and held it up to the light— “Twilled silk brocade, from a man�
��s waistcoat I should think—and grabbed this watch fob, because they were the last things she caught hold of in her desperate bid to stay alive. Before this man in his silk brocade waistcoat quite deliberately choked the life out of her.”
Lady Claire turned her exquisite, solemn face to his, and asked, “Are you quite positive?”
In grave stillness her beauty was amplified in a way it hadn’t been when she was gay and animated, though she had always seemed lovely to him then.
But her fineness—her pale skin as smooth as alabaster, her blue eyes, wide and full of pity, her delicate bone structure carved from marble—made him achingly away of the difference between them.
He hated that he could not give her the answer she wanted. “As positive as I can be. But as I am neither an anatomist, nor a surgeon, that is why I’ve sent for Mr. Pervis.”
“And he is an...” She swallowed hard around the word. “Anatomist?”
“No, he is a proper medical surgeon. Up at the naval hospital. And he therefore has some experience of…violence. He will give his opinion about my conclusions, or draw his own, and then we will proceed.”
“And if he, too, thinks she was murdered?” She had turned her head, asking both directly and carefully, as if her question were a test of sorts—a test he did not yet completely understand. “What will you do about it?”
He could only give her the truth.
But he hesitated, because the words he wanted to say—the words that were in his head shouting for their chance to be heard—were ugly and brutal.
He wanted to tell her that he was going hunt whoever had put his hands around this poor, powerless, defenseless girl’s neck, and he was going to track them down like a bloodhound, and make them pay at the tight end of a noose. That he would see justice done, whether within the law or without. That he would choose whichever course of action, legal or not, that would serve when the moment came.
He was an old hand at skirting the law—that was why the Admiralty came to him with their unsolvable problems. He would not shy away from the doing of dirty, necessary deeds.
But she, who had so little experience of the world outside the ton, would not be able to understand this about him. She still thought he was a duke—that he would cleave to propriety out of loyalty to his family name, and honor.
“You’re going help her, aren’t you?” she pressed. “You’re going to find out who did this?” Her voice held an urgency he shared.
“Yes.” Tanner spoke carefully, though he had already decided to involve himself—the moment he had decided to take the body on board the skiff, he had been involved. And he would see it through to the bitter end.
She nodded in relieved agreement, her face still and beautiful even with her bruises, and he saw for the first time that she was looking at him not with curiosity or fear, but with admiration. “Thank you, Your Grace.”
His pride—his damnable savage pride—was like to crack his chest wide open with the pleasure he felt at her regard. But he had learned not to show himself so incautiously.
“You do not have to thank me. A great wrong has been done, and justice must be served.”
“Yes. But not every man, nor certainly every duke, would feel that such efforts needed to be made on behalf of a mere maidservant. And that is why I thank you.” She gave him another of her small smiles, a demi-tasse of sweetness. “Besides being a nice man, you really are rather remarkable.”
He knew he was remarkable. Remarkable for the differences that separated him from other men. Different for the way he saw the world, and the people in it. Different in the speed and acuity with which his mind leapt from one detail to the next, drawing out connections and patterns.
But to be seen as remarkable by her eyes…
His chest was not going to crack open—it had already melted under the warm sun of her regard.
But he allowed his mouth only to say, “You are kind,” even while his mind was silently shouting, ‘Yes, yes. I agree!’ If only because this remarkable, exquisite girl had said it was so.
He would do anything—anything for her. Anything she asked.
And she did not even have to ask.
It seemed impossible that she did not know this—know the power she had over him.
“Yes,” she acknowledged, “I hope I am kind, but also truthful. I’ve never met anyone like you.” She smiled again—a small, almost-shy curving of her lips that stopped just short of being coy. “And I haven’t even properly been introduced to you.”
“Indeed. We’ve met rather improperly. But impropriety has its own rewards, don’t you think?”
But she was kind and polite, and lived with a different set of rules than the ones he held for himself.
“Yes.” Her expression changed and the kind regard slowly fell from her face. “No. Impropriety has more costs than rewards. If I’ve learned nothing else, I’ve learned that tonight. And so has poor Maisy Carter, though I can’t think that anything she did was an impropriety. But whatever it was, it resulted in her...death— No.”
She shook her head as if she could will herself into acceptance by dint of determination.
“I’ll not shy away from the ugly words any more. Her murder. The words are rape and murder. I suppose I should be thankful that Rosing only tried to rape me when someone—someone in Richmond—murdered Maisy Carter. And she couldn’t do anything about it, and I can’t do anything about it. But you, you’re a man of influence and power. And you see things the way they really are, not just the way you wish them to be. You see and you understand. You see things I can’t see, and can’t understand. And with your power and authority, you can find out who did this. And you can make them pay.”
Her voice sounded tight and breathy—on the verge of tears—and in her distress she reached out to grasp his hand. “Please, Your Grace. Would you please do this for me?”
She did not need to beg. She did not need to even ask—he had already said yes. For her, he would do anything and everything he could—which was a very great deal.
She had no idea—she had never experienced anything of life beyond the confining, rarefied circle of the ton—of what he was capable.
But she was asking as if it were the greatest favor in the world. And she was holding his hand—this exquisite, fragile flower of a girl he had been afraid to presume to touch.
His chest was bursting with something more than mere pride—it was rude, impolite joy.
It was joy to feel that she was counting upon him.
“Lady Claire, your wish is my command. But you are wrong—you can do something about it. You can help me. You can stay, and help me.”
And then he said a word he had rarely used. “Please, Lady Claire. Please help me.”
She did not answer as he had expected—right away. Her glance skipped away from him and took a short trip around the room—from her torn gown and muddy, ruined shoes, to Miss Carter’s corpse, to his hands—before she looked back to him.
“Why?”
Because he wanted her. Because he did not want his time with her to come to an early end. Because he wanted her compromised so completely in the eyes of society, that she would accept the inevitable, and marry him. Because he needed more time to convince her to do it willingly.
“Because I need you,” he lied.
And he turned her hand within his own, and raised it to press a kiss to the center of her palm. Her skin was soft and supple beneath his lips, and still delicately scented with orange blossom and lily and rose, and still far, far too fine for the grubby likes of him.
But she did not tell him so. She did not disdain him.
Instead, it was as if a light had been kindled inside her. For the first time that evening, she looked incandescent, transformed back into the luminous girl he had worshiped. Her wide blue eyes softened, and she looked, if not exactly happy with her bruised, scratched face, then happier than she had been thus far that night.
“Yes,” she said finally. “I’d like that. I sh
ould very much like to help you.”
“Thank you.” He gave her hand—her sweet, fine, bone china hand—a gentle squeeze of thanks before she drew it away, and folded it up with her other.
She spoke so low, he almost didn’t hear her say, “Thank you for needing me.”
But then she physically shook off any further hint of melancholy with a brisk little toss of her blond head, and asked, “Where do we start?”
Tanner had to pull his attention back to the task at hand. “With Mr. Pervis, and with this fob.”
He held the gold piece up to examine more closely in the light of the lamp. The piece had all the appearance of being a Roman coin—it was impressed with the image of a man riding a horse, standing on top of a triumphal arch, and some Latinate words—but Tanner was certainly no scholar.
His thief’s instinct told him only that the coin itself was valuable, and the ornate gold setting of the fob was expensive and well-made. Experience told him it would fetch a pretty penny with a fence he knew up on Jewin Street.
But he was no longer in the business of fencing stolen goods. And the fob had far greater value as information about the killer.
It was a well-crafted, expensive piece. The kind of ornament only a rich and powerful man would wear. Not a footman. “Have you seen this before?”
“Not that I remember.” Lady Claire creased her perfect brow into a frown, and moved closer to peer at the object, before she took it from his hand. “But if I do remember my history lessons aright, it will be from the reign of the Emperor Claudius, made in commemoration of the conquest of Britain, somewhere near the year forty-five, or was it forty-six?”
Tanner worked to keep his surprise—and his delight—from his face. He had not expected her to be so extraordinarily well-educated as to know Roman history.
His well-educated goddess pointed to a particular mark. “You see here, the obverse side, where it says ‘De Britaan?’ That’s us, I should think, Britain, or—forgive my ignorance—more correctly ‘of the Britons.’ I believe—that is, if I recall correctly—they have found some coins like this in the excavation of Pompeii. They were shown in that exhibition—”
After the Scandal Page 8
