“Which brings me back to having you horsewhipped.”
Tanner felt his mouth stretch into a wide smile.
Oh, yes. He liked this—the ferocious matching of wits. He could feel the nearly primeval thrill of contention come over him like a physical thing—a pleasure that soaked down into his bones, and made his life worth living.
But he forced himself to remember that it was never a good idea to antagonize a man one wanted for one’s future father-in-law.
So he accepted the earl’s point with a small inclination of his head. “Point taken. But I didn’t come here to argue.”
“No? What did you come here for? Eighteen hours overdue, I might add.”
“I came here to propose.” Tanner was pleased his voice was level and smooth, and did not betray the mad leaping of his pulse—from trepidation or hope, he did not know. “Which I would have done eighteen hours ago, but I did not think you would be any more receptive to my suit then than you are now.”
“I will tell you plainly, Fenmore, that you are the last man on earth I would choose for my daughter.”
Tanner had to give the Earl Sanderson credit for not purposefully misunderstanding him.
“Acknowledged. I am deeply aware that I am not worthy of her, sir. But circumstances being what they are, your daughter has chosen me.”
“Chosen? You stand here, threatening to drag my daughter’s name through the mud of scandal unless I intervene with those who have laid the charge, and you—”
“No.” Tanner stepped toward Sanderson before he could stop himself. “No. That is the opposite of what I am saying. I will do anything, even face a charge, rather than see her exposed in any way. I was not the person who made this”—he spread his hands in irate frustration—“a public scandal. I took her away from Rosing so no one would know what occurred. So she would be spared the vicious pleasure your society seems to derive from others’ misfortunes.”
“You took her out of a boathouse, out of your grandmother’s house, without so much as a by your leave, sir, and you disappeared for an entire night. You took an innocent girl, who was in circumstances so far beyond her experience, and you lead her away from everything and everyone that she knew. And you did not bring her back until well into the next day. Are you mad? Or suicidal?”
“Yes. Yes to all those things. But the fact still remains, she was not so bereft of all good sense that she did not know that she chose. And she chose me. Quite emphatically.”
The earl’s face blanched white, and then went red. “By God, if you have touched one hair on my daughter’s head, I will—”
“I have.” He had touched her hair, stroked it’s silky length. He had held her in his arms. He had kissed her as if he were a dying man, and she a drop of water.
He had done as much as he dared.
Sanderson took a threatening step toward him. “You bastard.”
Tanner felt his own volatile temper begin to heat, and took his own step forward to meet the man toe to toe.
“I am not a bastard in breeding, nor or in action. And if you have been listening to your daughter, sir, then you will know that I saved your daughter. I saved her. Where were you, sir, when Lord Peter Rosing was dragging her down the length of that lawn?”
He raised his hand to point to the exact spot where Lord Peter Rosing had wrapped his meat hooks around Lady Claire Jellicoe’s delicate white arm.
“Where were you when he smashed her lovely porcelain face into the wall? Where were you?”
The quiet lash of his accusation was met with utter, charged silence.
The Earl Sanderson could obviously think of no suitable retort. But neither did he acknowledge his nearly fatal mistake.
“I was there,” Tanner reminded him. “And no matter your horsewhips, and your insults, and your distaste for me as a son-in-law, I would do it again in a second. Without thinking. I would do it for her.”
For a long moment there was no sound in the room but the storm of Tanner’s indignation, and the answering strain of the Earl Sanderson’s tightly controlled remorse. Neither spoke.
They stood there, facing each other, inches apart on the carpet. Each of them, he thought, equally full of regret and hope.
Tanner pressed his skeletal advantage. “The vile rumors must be stopped, and stopped now. I will not stand for her name to be besmirched for another moment.” He made each assertion a statement—there could be no further debate. “I will be her husband.”
He said it to convince them both. But it was nearly frightening, saying the words, admitting to himself that marrying her was everything he wanted—everything he had dreamed and plotted and schemed for the past twenty four hours to make happen.
“Every moment that you delay hurts her more. Think about that while you’re still trying to blame me for your lapse in oversight.”
“She has not yet agreed.”
“But she has been asked. She knows my intention. I did not do her the dishonor of asking her for her answer, as I thought it best to do you the honor of making my intentions clear. But I will ask her for her answer. I am compelled to.”
“And if she says no?”
Tanner could not contemplate such an outcome without going stark, raving mad as a rabid cur dog.
But he was not a savage. He would choose to be a gentleman.
“I will abide by Lady Claire’s choice. And by yours. Not to do so would do her a dishonor. But there will be a scandal, greater by far than the rumors snaking their way across society’s forked tongues now. But you will have to ask yourself, what purpose such a scandal will serve? You will have to ask yourself just why your lovely daughter was a target of Lord Peter Rosing, who usually prefers to rape servants like Maisy Carter—girls who have no power and no protection—in the first place.”
The Earl Sanderson’s face whitened as if Tanner had struck him. And indeed he had—he had struck right at the heart of the matter.
But the earl withstood the blow, and kept his own counsel.
But Tanner was not yet done. He played his most telling—and most wildly speculative—card.
“You will have to ask yourself if Lady Claire, or you, were really the target of Lord Peter Rosing’s assault. You will have to ask yourself just how far you are willing to go for your interest in counterfeiting gold coins in St. Catherine’s Dock, before the cost is the sacrifice of your daughter.”
Tanner gave him one last piece of advice before he turned on his heel, and marched purposefully up the sinuous spiral of the stairs. “You will have to decide, sir, whose side you really need to be on.”
Tanner retreated—although in truth he ascended—to his chamber, like a clever fox going to ground. A clever fox who has clever friends.
He found his clever friend Jack awaiting him, drinking his friend, the Duke of Fenmore’s fine French brandy, and going over his meticulous notes.
“Hello.” Jack looked up over the top of his spectacles. “Where have you been, dressed like a pallbearer?”
“Proposing. You?”
“Nothing so dangerous.”
“How did you know where to find me?”
“That girl—that walking mudskipper that Jinks calls ‘the lark.’ Ridiculous name. She told us you’d come here.”
“Clever girl.” But Tanner wasted no more time on that self-sufficient urchin. “Jack, tell me what you know. Did she drown?”
“Cause of Maisy Carter’s death in my opinion?”
“Who else’s opinion?”
“Shut up.” Jack flipped the notebook shut, and looked him in the eye. “She never drowned herself—her windpipe had been crushed. Quite thoroughly. Quite purposefully. I’ve seen convicts less hanged that this girl appears to be.”
Jack’s mouth was turned down in an expression of pained distaste. “And her nose had been broken. There was some swelling, and considerable bruising all up into her eyes, so it was not an old injury. There was some blood staining remaining on the edge of her shift, despite her time in
the water—noses bleed profusely and blood stains otherwise immaculate linen.”
“Ah.” This he knew, but Tanner let that information seep into his brain, and sort out where it belonged. “Yes. So by the time I found her the river had washed most other traces of the blood away?”
“Yes,” Jack agreed on a sigh. “But there was enough. In my opinion, whoever did this was violent, and knew what they were doing.”
“For power or pleasure?’
“Christ, Tanner.” Jack turned his weary old-before-his-time eyes away. “The questions you ask.”
“Questions that need to be asked.” Tanner didn’t have time for useless, interfering sentiment. “Well? Do you have the impression that it was done for power, or for pleasure?”
“I’m a man of science,” Jack countered. “I don’t form impressions.”
Tanner was impatient with his friend’s quibbles. “Of course you do. You said whoever did this knew what they were doing. That is an impression. And no doubt a correct one.”
Jack shook his head, and passed Tanner a small china bowl with some items in it—his own bowl, nicked from Sanderson House the only time he had even visited.
He had been a boy, and new to being His Grace of Fenmore. His seventy-two year old cousin, Charles, who had been Fenmore before him, had taken him to meet the Earl. Tanner had stolen the bowl then—an early keepsake of his obsession.
“She had money in her pockets.” Jack pointed out the coins in the bowl. “Six shillings. Not an inconsiderable sum for a housemaid.”
“Ah. Just the right amount for a generous vail from a visitor she had been assigned to assist.” It made him fonder of Claire than ever to know that she was a considerate employer.
But Tanner’s mind also leapt to two other conclusions instantly. “Whoever killed her didn’t want her money—any professional worth his salt would have turned out her pockets before she had even breathed her last. So she must have been interrupted—and murdered—before she had a chance to store such a precious amount of money away—it would normally be too much for her to be carrying around. What else?”
“Ear bobs. Or one ear bob.”
Tanner picked up a small piece of jewelry from the bowl.
“Ear bobs,” Jack repeated. “Ladies wear them, as jewelry, in their ears.”
“Don’t be an ass, Jack. I know what they are.”
And he knew whose they were as well. He had spent years watching Lady Claire Jellicoe. He had seen these dangling aquamarines on many occasions—a subtle counterpoint to the sparkling blue of Lady Claire’s eyes. “They are Lady Claire’s.”
“Are they? But there was only one of them. In the girl’s other pocket. The money was in one, and the ear bob in the other. So it rather looks like theft on her part, except why would she be strangled for theft?”
“Which one?”
Jack frowned, and shook his head in confusion. “Which pocket?
“Yes.” Tanner tried to keep the edge of impatience from his tone, but it was impossible. “Which pocket?” he demanded. “Tell me you noted it. Or tell me you have the clothes, still. Tell me.”
“I have the clothes, still.” Jack was regarding him as if he were mad, but he pointed to a small canvas sack on the desk next to the bowl. “I judged her clothes too ravaged and too distressing for the body to be dressed in for her mother to see. Jinks and I found some other clothes.”
But Tanner wasn’t listening. He was rifling through the neat stack of clothing so he could turn out the pockets.
“The right pocket has a hole in it. The left does not. Was the money found in the left?”
Jack consulted the notebook he brought with him. “Yes.”
“She was right handed.”
One of Jack’s brows rose over a narrow-eyed look. “I could determine that, were I to examine the muscle attachment of her arm bones, but how do you come by such a conclusion?”
“Callus—on the inside tip of her right index finger. Presumably from sewing, as one of the most important skills required of a lady’s maid is the care and repair of clothing. There was no callus on the left.”
Jack bent to his notes to see if he could find the same observation, but Tanner’s mind was already speeding ahead. “What sort of maid, who is said to be meticulous, and very good at her job, who is ambitious, and wants to move up in her position, maybe become a housekeeper someday— What sort of competent professional servant throws it all away to steal an ear bob, and put it in a pocket she knows has a hole in it?”
Jack was giving him another baffled, squinty-eyed look. “Wait a moment. How do you know she knew her pocket had a hole in it?”
“It was her job to take care of clothing. The rest of her appearance is neat, her clothes in good repair. And the hole is small, and formed by the unraveling of the seam, here”—he showed Jack the loose threads in question— “not by any wear in the fabric. So it was a recent thing, this splitting of the pocket seam, perhaps by a small scissors if she were doing mending.”
He shook his head to pull himself back into his train of thought. “It doesn’t matter how, it only matters that it was fresh—or else she would have repaired it.”
“Come now,” Jack objected. “This is all conjecture.”
“No!” Tanner could hear the aggravation invade his voice. “Think man. She is right handed. She would have normally put her coins in her right pocket, where she would have access to them. But the coins came from the left pocket. So she put them there because she knew she had a split in her right.”
Jack stared at him. “And so?”
“So, don’t you see? She never would have put valuable ear bobs in her right pocket. She knew it had a hole.”
“So?” Jack’s voice had risen with frustrated aggravation.
“She didn’t put the ear bob there. Someone else did. But why? Why?” His brain immediately supplied two very plausible answers. “To make it look like she had stolen them. But we know she could not have stolen them, because she never would have put them in a pocket with a hole in it. And who would steal just one of a pair?”
His hands were already examining the hems of Maisy Carter’s now-dry skirts, feeling all the way around the edge. When he didn’t find what he was looking for, he put aside the skirt to examine the thicker cotton petticoat, running his hand down the length of the fabric, feeling for any anomalies, any bumps or unexpected knots in the material until—
“Hello.” Tanner turned the quilted skirt of the maid’s petticoat over, and turned back the flat seam where it had been pressed apart, to reveal the mate to the aquamarine ear bob, hooked on a stitch. “And there’s the pair.”
“But what does having a pair mean?” Jack was leaning forward, curious and aggravated at himself for not seeing what to Tanner was so obvious.
“It means that someone—and I can only assume it is our murderer—placed these ear bobs in her pocket as some sort of diversion.”
“A diversion from what?”
“From the true nature of the crime. From the murder. If all he did to her was murder?”
Jack looked at him in his sharp incisive way. “You frighten me sometimes with the way your mind works, you know that?”
Tanner was to impatient to be insulted, or even concerned. He knew his mind worked in ways that other people thought strange—it was why he was cleverer.
“Just tell me if she was only strangled.”
“You are right, damn you. She was raped. Quite forcibly. From behind, I should think. The pattern of bruising...” Jack simply shook his head. “I’ve never seen the like of it on a deceased’s body before.”
But Tanner felt the blow ring through him like a bell, clear and resonant. “Fuck all.”
Jack took a weary breath. “Well, that’s one way of putting it.”
“No. I—” He ought not to say it—that there had been another rape that evening. He didn’t have the right to tell anyone if Claire did not grant him permission to.
But she had already
told her parents and his grandmother—and he could only pray that the belligerent Earl Sanderson would have the moral fiber to do the right thing with that information. Because if a man of the Earl Sanderson’s reputation and power and authority—a man whose position was unassailable—spoke against the rapist perhaps, just perhaps, something might at last be done about Lord Peter Rosing.
But Tanner was getting ahead of himself.
And Jack was catching up. “He also used a ligature of some kind to choke her, possibly during the rape. There is a deep, but narrow line of a bruise in a perfect semi-circle just above the collarbone which is different from the marks from the hands that crushed her windpipe.”
“Her necklace—a cross upon a chain.” Claire had remarked upon it specially. “He would have grabbed it from behind.” Tanner could see it in his mind’s eye as if it were happening in front of him. “Fisted it tight to control her, or even make her black out.”
And he could still see Rosing’s hand clamped across Lady Claire Jellicoe’s mouth. See her china blue eyes wide and dark with panicked fright.
He should have killed Rosing when he had the chance.
Jack squinted into the air to contemplate the possibility. “Seems about right.”
His detachment pulled Tanner back out of his rage, back to the facts that would help him put the bastard Rosing away.
“And how,” Jack was asking, “if I may be bold enough to ask, does your Lady Claire Jellicoe fit into all of this? And don’t bother to tell me coincidence—I know you don’t believe in it, either.”
“She’s not my Lady Claire.” Not yet. Not if he weren’t very, very careful, and very, very clever. And very circumspect.
But if there were one man in all of England he could trust, it would be Jack. “I stopped a man from raping Lady Claire. From behind. Shoved up against a rough brick wall with a bloody glove shoved into her mouth. Last night, here at Riverchon, in the boathouse.”
Jack let out a long, low whistle.
“Two girls, one rape and murder, followed by an attempted rape? All here? That is...disturbing. Too damn disturbing to be coincidental, don’t you think?”
After the Scandal Page 26
