Bloody, bloody useless.
Claire wasted more than a few moments trying in vain to reach the laces at the center of her back, but try as she might, it was impossible—Maisy had tucked them securely inside. And it was impossible to ring for assistance—she was sure there was no one else in the house but the duke, the surgeon, and the man Jinks.
She searched the wardrobe and the drawers of the dressing table, in case there were a scissors, or some other thing she might use to cut herself free. But the dressing table also had a mirror, in which which could she herself clearly for the first time.
Despite the cool bath of river water, and the cold compress, and the beefsteak, her face was clearly already starting to bruise. Her left cheek, where the scratches sliced across the skin as if a cat had raked her, was already pink and slightly swollen, and puffy to the touch. There was no way she could conceal her attack. Not from her parents—not from anyone.
Not unless she didn’t go home.
The thought was as frightening as it was liberating—her whole body almost vibrated with the force of the possibility.
She had never been off on her own. Never before tonight, when His Grace, the Duke of Fenmore had laid a man out like an undertaker, and shown her how to row a boat, and fire a gun, and had reminded her that she could climb a wall.
He had shown her that there was another world out there, were balls and gowns and polite, perfect manners didn’t matter.
And he had pledged to get her revenge. Justice he had called it, being a duke and a gentleman. But revenge is what it would be, for herself and for Maisy Carter.
He would give her what she wanted, even if she was afraid. But she decided she was more afraid of being useless and unlearned that she was of being hurt. She was already hurt, and she had survived.
And His Grace would never let her be hurt any further. And he would get her out of this damned dress.
Before she could change her mind, Claire went to the connecting door and rapped soundly, though she did try out different excuses and explanations on her tongue. But before she could come up with the most efficacious way of explaining herself, His Grace opened the door.
He frowned at her in his oblique way. “Having second thoughts?”
She was having third thoughts—about him.
He had changed into worn, but clean, linen. He had turned the cuffs of his shirtsleeves back from his bared forearms, which, along with his face and dark hair, bore the glistening remains of a recent washing.
The hair at his temple was damp with beads of water, and the knowledge that she had interrupted his washing seemed almost too intimate somehow, even as she stood there about to ask for help with her lacing. Claire felt heat blossom across her cheeks and down her neck. Which no doubt made her unattractive and splotchy. Which was ridiculous—the strange awkwardness was all on her part.
“No.” She firmed her thready voice. “I’m afraid… I can’t get myself out of this gown.”
It took no more than a moment for His Grace’s changeable eyes to reflect his understanding of her predicament. “Ah. Your laces?”
“Yes.” She cleared her throat again, and made herself speak louder than a whisper.
“But you’re afraid of…?”
Of him. Of herself. Of being again at the mercy of a man she really did not know.
“If I could just have a scissors?”
“I’m sure I could find you a pair. But it might be easier if I just did you the service.”
He made another one of those silently elegant gestures of his—twirling his finger slowly in the air—so that she would spin around, and give him her back.
She did so, but put a hand to the bodice of her dress in the front to hold it securely to her. Through the material, she could feel the erratic tattoo of her heartbeat, throttling against her ribs. But it was silly to be nervous with His Grace. He was not like other men. He was strange and aloof, and wholly and completely a gentleman.
She spoke again to cover her ridiculous sensibilities. “The laces are tucked in, I believe. Carter—Maisy Carter—was quite particular that the ties not show. If you would just pull the laces out and untie them, I can do the rest.”
She had expected that he would make short work of it, his fingers as efficient and capable with this task as he had been with all the others—the handing of the skiff, and his detached examination of Maisy Carter.
But he wasn’t.
He was all closeness and slow, almost fumbling care, as if he were making an examination of how a lady’s laces were tied—as if he were taking mental notes of how it had been done, and how he might improve upon the style of lacing or the knot Maisy Carter had made.
He moved closer to her back—so close she could feel the heat emanating from his body. So close she could feel each the gentle tug as he pulled the laces slowly free, drawing them one by one through the eyelets, pulling the fabric so that the material of the bodice hugged tight against her chest.
Beneath her hand, her pulse battered against her palm.
Her chest, she now noticed, was rising and falling rapidly, as if she were frightened again. But she wasn’t exactly. She was something else.
Something new and different in an altogether personal way. Something light and suspended and breathless, like a dream where she didn’t have to breathe.
And then she felt the pressure of a single finger tracing the line of her spine, from the base of her neck downward to a spot low between her shoulder blades, leaving a trail of tingling heat and sensation that burrowed beneath her skin, and nestled deep into her bones, and stopped her from speaking.
It all but stopped her from breathing.
She stepped away, putting distance between them. What was wrong with her?
His Grace remained his usual cool, reserved self—as practical and kind and unaffected as he had ever seemed. Everything a duke ought to be.
He cleared his throat, and said. “I hope that is satisfactory.”
“Thank you. Yes.” Claire turned to face him, preserving some small part of her modesty, as the gown was gaping open in the back, exposing her underclothes to the man. “I think I can manage now.”
“Yes. Then. Yes. I’ll go.”
“Thank you. But—” As she had already faced one fear, she might as well face—quite literally—another. “I was wondering if perhaps you also had—or there was somewhere—some rice powder. For my face. I shouldn’t want to appear in public looking like this.”
Like she was irreparably damaged.
He looked at her damaged face, and then stepped closer, as if her would examine her in the same close way he had Maisy Carter. But he didn’t.
He looked grave and solemn, especially when he turned down his mouth with a sort of small, ironic smile. “You won’t need it where we’re going. Better maybe if you do look a bit roughed up.”
“Better? But what will people think?”
Then he did come closer, and reached out with one careful hand to her chin, and turn her cheek to the light.
“They’ll think I’m a brute,” he muttered under his breath, as if she couldn’t hear him.
As if she weren’t right there watching his eyes turn dark sea green in the candlelight.
“But it will serve our disguise, and even help. If people think I’m such a reprobate as would hurt such a beautiful young woman, they’ll know I’ve no compunctions whatsoever about giving a thorough basting to anyone else.”
“But you are not a brute. You are a true, perfect gentleman.” He had chosen to be so.
But he stepped back from her abruptly. “I am sorry.” Claire wasn’t entirely sure what he was apologizing for until he said, “I never should have let him get near you. I’ll make him pay for this, Lady Claire. So help me God, I will.”
His vehemence no longer astonished her—it comforted her to know that he understood her feelings so exactly. “Thank you, Your Grace.”
“You are welcome.” And with that, he bowed and removed himself
, and quietly closed the door behind him.
And left her glad at what a strange, strange interesting duke His Grace of Fenmore was proving himself to be.
Chapter 8
Tanner did not know how his feet carried him from the room, nor how he managed to close the door.
On such matters his mind was alarmingly blank.
Because it was full to bursting with other things—the entrancing way Lady Claire Jellicoe’s spine had curved down from her shoulders. The shadowed dip of skin behind her shift and stays. The astonishing elegance of her stays themselves—beautifully made with exquisite attention to detail.
It had been everything he could do to to keep himself from letting his fingers stray all the way down the long, elegant line of her spine. It had been everything to make himself speak like a gentleman. Everything to simply remember to breathe.
He did so now, taking a deep, deep breath—inhaling the memory of her warm perfume the same way he had inhaled the scent of her body from his coat as soon as he was safely behind the door of his chamber.
Orange blossom. Exquisite.
And he was going to take this exquisite bloom of a young woman with him into hell.
He must have run utterly, hopelessly mad. Because he was filled with the same sort of excitement—a physical hum of readiness in his body—that he remembered as a boy, out stalking rich culls to dip with his sister.
His professional acumen had remained—he could still spot a goldfinch at twenty paces—but he’d missed that jangle of excitement that used to grip him hard when his sister, Meggs, had tipped him the nod, and set him after a mark.
The intervening years had left a different sort of mark. Hunger no longer hollowed out his belly—the dukedom had seen to feeding him up. But the plenty had left a different sort of fire in his belly.
A fire he had never been able to slake.
A fire that flared ever stronger in the presence of Lady Claire Jellicoe.
Tanner folded the evening coat Lady Claire had returned to him and set it carefully aside—an act of sentimentality he decried in himself, but was powerless to resist.
He would likely never wear it again, nor surrender it ever to be laundered, because it still held the warmth of her body, her scent.
Would that it always could.
Yet he knew it would not. So Tanner took another scalding gulp of the coffee Jinks had finally delivered—as aromatic and as dark as the peat bog Jinks must have originally come from—and let the hot jolt of urgency set his blood to pumping, before he proceeded to change the rest of his clothing into what he thought of as his Seven Dials rig.
He discarded his satin breeches for the rough buckskins, and well-worn, heavy boots that were his usual companions when he ventured out into London’s meaner streets.
And mean they would be this morning. The meanest.
Which meant rechecking the gun he had retrieved from Lady Claire, and adding another to his waistband, along with the knives in his boots.
He was as ready as he could be. He could only hope she was as well.
Tanner left his bed chamber to return to the kitchens, where Jack was recording his observations into a notebook in his careful, precise hand. “What have you got?”
The surgeon didn’t look up. “Death by strangulation, just as you supposed. Throttled her as effectively as if she’d been hanged. Choked off the blood flow in the jugular vein and carotid arteries first—evidenced most easily in the petechiae here in the whites of her eyes.”
“Pinprick dots of red. I see.” A new fact to tuck into the orderly file room of his mind.
“Yes. I was about to remove her clothing, but I wanted to make sure there would be no other viewers.” Jack gave him a rather particular look—a look that asked a different question from the one he had just voiced.
“You mean Lady Claire?”
“Yes, Lady Claire.” Jack tipped his chin to the side, always a sign that he was rampantly curious, but too well-mannered to blurt out his question.
Unlike Tanner, who countered his friend’s curiosity by bluntly concentrating on the practicalities. “Do you need to anatomize the girl to know what happened?”
“No.” The surgeon shook his head. “Not likely. The signs are clear that she was murdered.”
“But was she raped?”
“Ah.” Jack’s head went back slowly. “You wouldn’t ask unless you had good reason to suspect so stored up in that fiendishly clever brain of yours. Further examination will be necessary. Which will necessitate removal of the clothing. Which would be easiest to accomplish before the full rigor mortis sets in. Which brings us back to Lady Claire Jellicoe. And whether or not she is likely to reappear in this kitchen.”
“We’ll leave directly.”
“To take her home?”
“Later.”
“Later?” Jack’s look was cautiously probing—narrowed eyes over one raised brow, along with that characteristically questioning tip of the head. “How much later? And I have to ask, what on earth you were doing alone with Lady Claire Jellicoe in the first place?”
Tanner was not going to answer the question. He would not expose Lady Claire in that way. “We were not doing anything. I told you, Lady Claire identified the body as that of her servant Maisy Carter.”
“You do realize—? Surely, even you must realize what must occur if you’ve had that girl—that girl, the daughter of an earl—out on the river all these hours?”
“Even me? Careful, Jack.”
“Yes, even you, Tanner. You have to realize that there are some social conventions that are set in stone. Not even the silent, frosty Duke of Fenmore could hope to silence, or endure such a scandal.”
“I can endure anything.”
“But can Lady Claire? Will she want to? Do you want her to?”
This was a question he had not adequately answered for himself. But he was saved from finding the answer by the arrival of Lady Claire herself, who stooped down to peer cautiously under the lintel as she came down the stairs. “Your Grace?”
“Yes, my lady?” he answered automatically. And in that moment he realized that he would do almost anything it seemed to make her his lady in actuality. Even take her to the Almonry.
He really did have a stupendously stupid amount of pride.
Lady Claire came down the last few steps and stood at the bottom of the stairwell, as if awaiting his approval. She was dressed much as he, in worn dark clothes, sturdy fabrics and heavy boots.
But if he had thought the drabber dress his sister had left behind from her days of working the dub would have diminished and dulled Lady Claire’s beauty, he was wrong.
Even without silk and satin, she was exquisite. And even more so because the dull, rough fabric of the gown made the fineness of her beauty stand out more starkly.
She looked both the same, and entirely different—a younger, far less polished version of herself, from the days when she must have rambled over her father’s country estate, climbing trees and chasing after her brothers. She looked like a wild woodland nymph from some ancient story, earthy and natural, and, dare he say it, free.
Free to come with him.
Her long shining, golden hair was also freed from its coif, swirling loosely into a knot at her nape. The messy coil was an attractive nuisance—it was all he could do not to plunge his hands into the bright strands and disrupt the whole thing.
But his practical, organized mind reasserted itself. “You’ll want to wear shawl to cover your bright hair. And to remove your ear bobs—they’ll make a temping target, and I should hate to have your lobes ripped as a result.”
He meant to scare her. He meant for her to completely understand what she was getting herself into. Her costly ear bobs, jeweled with diamonds and pearls, were valuable enough to keep half of the Almonry’s residents in gin for a ten-year.
“Oh, yes, I understand.” She quickly unpinned the jewels, and held them out to him in the palm of her hand.
“Did yo
u find the pockets sewn into petticoats?” The jewels would be safe enough in Megg’s deep pockets—his canny sister had hidden the entirely of their wealth there many a time.
“No. I kept my own chemise—” A swath of color swept across the lady’s cheeks. “No. Perhaps you might have a safe place for them here?”
“Yes. Of course.” Tanner had at least two caches hidden in the old walls, and he suspected that Jinks must have several more he could be made to divulge in a pinch.
“Thank you. And I have the note to my parents.”
As she handed him the ear bobs and the unsealed note, her fingers brushed against his palm, and Tanner was reminded again how soft her skin was. She had the hands of a lady—hands that had never done any kind of manual labor, or rough, uncomfortable work. Hands that would only find exercise in piano sonatas, or embroidery work. Fingers long and supple and fragile.
She was a fine china teacup, suitable for taking life in manageable sips. Entirely unsuited to the lesson he was giving her now.
But she wanted more, she had said. She wanted to be competent and capable and self determining in a new and different way.
“You’re welcome,” he said stupidly, because he no longer remembered what he was thanking her for.
And he stood there awkwardly for another long moment, because he couldn’t seem to stop himself from looking at her, and marveling that he appeared to be living through a waking dream. A dream wherein everything he had ever fantasized about Lady Claire Jellicoe was coming true—she was with him, away from society, and looking at him with a sort of hopeful cheerfulness that told him she really was as mad as he.
“Are you ready for the next lesson?”
“Yes, I’m— No. I can’t lie.” She looked at him, her wide blue eyes open and guileless. “I must admit, I’m afraid.” She caught her lip between her teeth. “And excited, perhaps? But definitely afraid. But it will be all right, won’t it? You do know what you’re doing, don’t you?”
“I do. Come with me, and I’ll show you. But, before we go, let us have a look at the clues the tenacious Miss Carter left us—the fob and the scrap of fabric.”
After the Scandal Page 11
