After the Scandal

by Elizabeth Essex

  But she felt light and suspended again, as if the entirety of the earth had just narrowed to the two of them, alone together in the middle of the wide churchyard of the Abbey—she could barely feel her feet touching the ground. All she could see and feel was this strange and wonderful and warm man asking her what she thought they should do.

  It was an idea and an offer so foreign to her existence, that for the longest moment, she could do nothing as the pleasure slid through her, as slow and warm and golden and sweet as honey.

  And she knew that something within her had shifted—she knew that she would never be the same girl she had been last night. That she as somehow older and wiser. Different.

  And that she was in very great danger of falling in love. With His Strange, Wonderful Grace, the Duke of Tanner.

  All because he had asked her. And protected her. And laid Lord Peter Rosing out like an undertaker.

  “Claire?”

  And she was falling just a little bit in love with him because she thought she understood what it cost him to ask. He was a man of ferocious intellect, a man who was quite used to making is own decisions—who was quite used to drawing his own correct assumptions, and making his own lightning quick decisions.

  For him to ask her, to solicit and consult her opinion, seemed entirely and unnecessarily generous.

  Or was it? “Why are you asking me?”

  He tipped his head from side to side as if he were uncomfortable—stripped of his usual surety like a schoolboy caught doing something he knows he oughtn’t. He frowned, a ferocious scowl clawing its way between his brows, and then shrugged as if it didn’t matter.

  But his answer was telling. “Isn’t that what people do when they respect each other—ask their opinion?”

  Oh, it was lovelier still, this feeling of gratitude and esteem and pride all blossoming in her belly in a spate of warmth and happiness—his esteem was indeed a heady, intoxicating prize.

  In her world, respect was a word that meant money and position and power and reputation. It was the water on the surface of a pond—one’s job in life was not to ruffle those waters, to make it all look effortless and easy.

  This evening, which might yet see her reputation in tatters, she had nothing but agitate the waters—allowing herself to be compromised by a known debaucher, running away with His Grace, involving herself in the murder of a young maid, traipsing across the countryside and half of London town.

  She had done everything her upbringing had told her not to do.

  And still, somehow, he esteemed her.

  It was as if she had been fed a food she had not known she craved.

  It left her hungry for more.

  “Yes,” she answered him. “That is what people who esteem each other do. Thank you. I am very sensible of the honor you do me.” And she returned it.

  “So how to decide?” she mused aloud. She took a deep breath, as if the damp morning air could clear both her mind and her lungs of the lingering aftereffects of such unsettling pleasure. “It seems to me we don’t know where to find Mr. Laytham, while you do know where to find your friend who knows a thing or to about Roman coins.”

  “Yes. But my friend is all the way in the City, which will mean another ride downriver, while Laytham ought to be closer at hand in Mayfair.”

  “But if we need to go by river—is the tide still running out?”

  He smiled—that sharp little smile of admiration that told her she was right. “Just.”

  “Then I suppose we’d best go with the tide while we can. And then we can return to Charing Cross and Mayfair more easily after the tide turns and runs upriver.”

  First the Almonry and now the City. The financial district at the heart of the ancient city of London was, in the Jellicoe family, the sole purvey of the Earl and his heir, her brother the viscount. Claire doubted her mother, and even her two other brothers had ever had occasion to go into the City. In Mayfair, the City came to them, rather than the other way round.

  But today, she was determined. “Well, I’ve never been to the City. It seems a good day for it.”

  And frankly, she did not want to go to Mayfair. Not yet. Mayfair was almost too familiar, and she was too familiar in Mayfair. Even dressed as she was, people were bound to recognize her.

  Tanner did not try to dissuade her. “Right then.” He accepted her decision with equanimity, and pointed the way up the street. “We go east, back to the water stair.”

  “Oh, but I forgot Lark has gone, and taken the boat.”

  “Indeed.” A slow smile ease its way across his face. “But there are other ways—have you never, in all your days in London, taken a wherry?”

  “No.” She had never travelled by any accommodation but private carriage. She had never set foot inside anything so humble as a hackney carriage, let along a boat for public hire. But it was a new day. “But it seems an excellent adventure.”

  His smile was deeply amused, and entirely complicit. “That’s my girl.”

  Was she his girl? She hardly knew—he said it so casually, so in tune with his rough and tumble persona that she could not tell what he was thinking.

  “Wooden Bridge Stairs.” He strode onward, his long swinging stride eating up ground.

  She had to skip to keep up, but the happy, bouncing stride suited her expansive mood. “I am glad we are doing this. Glad to be doing something instead of sitting at home, letting other people do things for me.”

  “I can’t think of another lass who would have done so well. You’ve been very...” He paused, as if he were searching for the right word. “Courageous.”

  A very flattering word. But, alas, not a true one.

  “Not I,” she declared. “My heart was pounding away the whole time.”

  “And that is courage,” he insisted, “going on even when you’re afraid. And I admire you greatly for it. And your compassion. Talking to Molly Carter like that—getting her to talk to you and tell you important things—”

  “Were they important things?”

  “Everything you got her to say was important. Even if it confirmed things I already knew. Everything has value. Everyone had value. You’re a rare genuine person, Claire. And I admire you greatly.”

  It was a lovely thing to hear. And very lovely to feel valued for who she was, not just her face, or her station, or her family’s fortune.

  “I’m glad.” It was very heady thing, his admiration. It was lovely and warm and easy. “I admire you as well.”

  They approached the water steps, and Tanner took her hand to help her into the vessel, but she held on to it as long as she could, liking the warm feeling of connection. Needing his calm, reassuring touch.

  He gave their destination. “White Lion Wharf.”

  The boat felt almost familiar now. Or at least the motion of the vessel was familiar, though this one was for public hire, with two weathered old watermen at the oars, squinting at her in the cool morning light, as inscrutably as the Duke of Fenmore ever had.

  But Claire was no longer willing to be intimidated by their stares. She put her chin and bruised cheek in the air, and looked inscrutable right back.

  They shot out into the swift water at Westminster Bridge, and around the great sweep in the wide river toward the City.

  The city—her city, in which she had lived for a good half of the year, every year of her life, and the city she thought she knew—looked incredibly different from the vantage of the bright, gleaming river.

  Across the water, the low, hulking outlines of the buildings were illuminated by the crystalline light that shimmered along the reflected surface of the water. It was magical and different and made her feel alive, and happy and privileged to live in such a place—the center of the entire world.

  The euphoric feeling might also have been due to the fact that she was snugged up close to Tanner. His nearness made her feel as if she had drunk too much of the chilled summer wine they had been serving on trays at Riverchon Park.

  But
she wasn’t drunk any wine. She was drunk on his presence, his attention. His esteem.

  “Where are we headed?” she asked him as the the gray stone arches of Blackfriar’s Bridge rose in the distance.

  “North.” The rough intonation was back in his voice—a caution not to give up her role in front of the watermen. “Along well-trodden paths in City.”

  “And your friend will see us this early in the morning?”

  He smiled his piratical smile that curved up one side of his mouth. “The rest of the city doesn’t stay abed till noon like the nobs.”

  “No, I don’t suppose they do.” And the evidence was all around her—every sort of craft, from small wherries like the one they travelled in, to small sailing ships and barges plied the waterway.

  “Why did you lie to her?”

  His question surprised her. “To whom?”

  Tanner tipped his head back upriver in the direction of the Almonry. “To Molly Carter. Why did you tell her that Maisy Carter didn’t suffer?” he pressed. “It won’t have done any good. She’ll see for herself the bruising when she sees the body.”

  “Perhaps. But I thought it would give her at least some small ease of mind, at least for now.” She could feel her shoulders hunch into an apologetic shrug.

  She couldn’t make out his tone. He seemed inscrutable again, giving her a test she did not know if she wanted to pass.

  “Because that’s what people do. At times like that, sometimes people need to be told what they want to hear. And maybe when the time comes, she’ll see it for the kindness it was intended.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.” He spoke as if he were slightly baffled—as if he never thought of saying the expected thing. As if he had only ever dealt in hard truths and uncomfortable realities.

  What a strange, hard life he must have lived.

  “We’ll head up Bennet’s Hill and Godliman Street to Paul’s Chain, and the round the back of the churchyard toward Aldersgate.”

  It was as if he could measure the precise distances between the turnings.

  “Do you carry a map around in your head?” She was trying to tease him, but he was so different from anyone else of her acquaintance that she had to ask.

  “Yes. Don’t you? You always need to have two ways in, and at least three ways out of every situation.”

  “Every situation? Is that something you learned in your childhood?”

  “Yes,” he said in his emphatic way. “But it would have suited— It is good advice for everyone.”

  He meant it was good advice for her. That she would have been much better served to have thoughts of ways out of walking with Lord Peter Rosing. But she hadn’t.

  But she couldn’t linger on that rather morose, as they had come to the arched spans of the Blackfrairs Bridge, and neared the north bank of the river, where fingers of wharves and piers reached out over the muddy banks exposed by low tide to find the water.

  “White Lion, gov’nor,” the wherryman nearest the bow called out.

  Tanner slipped some coins into the nearest oarsman’s callused hand. “Up close there, to the ladder.”

  A ladder at the end of the pier descended into the shallow water and ascended to the structure above via a trap door.

  Tanner jumped out of the wherry with an ease borne of long familiarity and had the trapdoor unlocked in a trice.

  She clambered after him when he ascended the rickety rungs. “What is this place?”

  “A wharf. Business of a friend.”

  “He must be a very good friend indeed to give you keys, and let you walk though his locked up warehouse.”

  A friend whom he must visit often, judging from the ease with which he navigated the dim, crowded interior—Tanner wove his way around crates and stacks of gunny bags as dexterously as a cat.

  And despite trying to follow in his footsteps, Claire tripped over a low crate. “Drat it.”

  Tanner remedied the situation by simply taking her by the hand. “Actually, the warehouse is mine—or Fenmore’s more accurately. As Fenmore, I bought up all the places where I used to live.”

  He used to live here?

  But Claire did not have time to ask, or ponder than particularly cryptic statement, because he was moving forward with her in the dark.

  She could not have said which way they went, or how they made their way through the darkened building, because the entirety of her mind was consumed by the feel of his hand holding hers.

  His hand was long boned, and rather finer than she might have thought, but the feeling of his warm, sleek muscled flesh pressing intimately against hers was so different from all of the times she had held hands with other gentleman in dances, through the interference of cotton and kid leather gloves.

  Tanner fanned his fingers to mesh with her, and hold her securely at his side in a way that made her feel both held and free. He had held her hand briefly on the street, but his felt different.

  This felt close and intimate and personal in a way that had nothing to do with playing a role for public consumption. Indeed, they were entirely alone, and in the dark. In more ways than one.

  In another moment, they burst out onto the bright, sooty, twisting streets along the river. Despite the fact that the church bells were tolling out the seven o’clock hour, the streets were already crowded, as they made their way around a small church on the corner of Thames Street, and up a narrow lane past the George Inn, and an official-looking, courtyarded building that bore the sign of the Herald’s Office. Public houses and gin mills alike spilled their patrons out onto the streets in the warm summer air.

  Claire had never really walked on the street in London—in the country she might walk and ride freely, but not in London. In London one did not want to be seen walking more than a few leisurely blocks on Oxford Street, or the new part of Regent Street on her own power, but shopping trips had always been made with the Sanderson town coach idling alongside, at her mother’s disposal.

  Encountering the world as a pedestrian, navigating wet gutters and pungent horse droppings, was certainly different from watching the world pass by from the privileged vantage point of the windows of a coach.

  As they made their way up the long reach of Aldersgate, dodging daytime drunks and cits alike, Claire hoped she never took such a ride for granted again.

  And she was rather disappointed to find that here, in the narrow, well-ordered streets of the City, Tanner was not as anxious to keep her to close to his side. He did not drape his arm across her shoulders. But he neither did he let go of her hand when they turned into the strangely ordered stair-step configuration of Angel Alley.

  Tanner knew his way here better than he had in the Almonry, because he did not need to pause for direction, but went right to the rear door of a house that fronted on Jewin Street.

  As they waited, Claire could hear a mumbled shuffling sound nearing the door.

  “...wake a man so early in the day. Who is it that bothers a body so early in the morning when half of London is still abed, and before he has broken his fast?”

  “Elias, it’s the Tanner.”

  A small peephole in the wall to the right of the door sprang open, and then shut with a snap. And then the door opened, revealing a gray-bearded old man in a night cap and dressing gown.

  “Tanner, my boy. Come in, come in. And tell me what you’re about.”

  The old man’s wiry eyebrows rose when he saw Claire standing behind Tanner, “And company, as well. Well, this is a special occasion. Come in, come in.”

  The old tradesman picked up a taper from the small table in the entryway, and shuffled off down the corridor into the gloom.

  Tanner plunged after him with the ease of a familiar, and Claire once more had to scamper to keep up, or be left behind.

  The old man led them through an unlit workroom, and up some narrow stairs into a small sitting room brightened by high windows, and made comfortable with several well-used, upholstered chairs.

  “Have you brok
en your fast? Come have something to eat. Let me offer your friend a chair. It’s a long way from the wharves to Jewin Street.”

  “Thank you. Elias Solomon, this is my friend Claire. Claire, Mr. Solomon is a goldsmith of some repute.”

  “Miss Claire.” The old tradesman made a courtly, gentlemanly bow. “Any friend of the Tanner is a friend of the Solomon brothers.”

  “Thank you. Likewise, I’m sure.” Claire returned his manners with a curtsy of her own, and looked about the small room over the workshop. A small table positioned nearby, with decanters of water and wine, and a plate of fruit. And no trace of a brother.

  The goldsmith must have followed her gaze. He gestured to the table. “Come have some watered wine,” Mr. Solomon offered.

  “Thank you.” She took a tentative sip, knowing it was only right to accept the man’s hospitality, but she noticed that Tanner did not.

  And then she did what she always did when she felt nervous, or out of place, she made small talk. “How did you know we had come from the wharves?”

  It was as if everyone saw things she couldn’t see.

  Her question elicited a chuckle from the goldsmith. “Because he comes in the back, with damp shoes, and damp hems like he always does.” He flicked a gnarled finger toward Tanner’s redingote. “And no carriage in the street in front of my shop, where it would do me some good to attract customers. And he brings with him such a pearl, I know he must have found you in the South China seas, and come straight from his boat to me.”

  Claire laughed at such charmingly fantastical praise, but was more pleased to see that Tanner smiled along as well. “I found this pearl in Richmond, actually.”

  “Farther up the river.” Mr. Solomon waved his hand. “But a pearl from the water all the same. Now tell me why you’ve come.”

  Tanner did not prevaricate. In his usual abrupt manner, he produced the watch fob and thrust it at the man. “What can you tell me about this?”

  “Ah. This.” The tradesman’s eyes narrowed. “Where did you get it?”

  “From a murdered girl.”

  The older man heaved out a sigh, and made a face like soured milk. “This is what you bring me, murder before breakfast? Who can eat with such things going on. Let me see it.” He squinted at the golden fob in the light from the window for a moment, before he shook his head. “I don’t like it. We’ll go downstairs.”