After the Scandal

by Elizabeth Essex

  “It is a matter of an accusation before the law only. But this is how you talk about my daughter, the young woman to whom, you tell me, your son already considers himself bound? Your son who “lies broken’? A broken man is what you offer her for a husband?”

  Too late, Hadleigh heard the heat in the earl’s steely tone. “He is injured. And he is a gentleman, sir. He has been taught what is right.”

  “But what of you, Hadleigh, with your heated words? To what purpose all this”—Earl Sanderson made a gesture between them—“in service of? For it is certainly not in service of my daughter, of whom you speak so disparagingly. You spoke of not being coy and cozening, Hadleigh, so don’t think to cozen me. What do you seek from an alliance between your son and your house, and my daughter and my house?”

  “So you do understand. An alliance, such as all noble marriages bring. Nothing more nothing less. I have long sought just such an alliance between our houses. You know that.”

  “Nothing more? You will recall I have turned down other offers of an alliance before—only two days ago when you tried to blackmail me into joining your scheme.”

  “Perhaps now you will reconsider.”

  “Perhaps not. As I told you, I am not at all interested in joining the financial conquest of Britain. I am no gambler.”

  But Tanner had heard the well-chosen words—financial conquest—an pricked up his ears—Sanderson must be talking of the gold aureii.

  “And I will not gamble with my daughter’s portion either,” the earl was saying. “Or were you not interested in how much she will bring?”

  “Don’t be daft.” Hadleigh moved closer to the earl to correct himself. “But do not imagine that I will need her money.”

  “And does your son? He has gambling habits, or so I’m told.”

  Hadleigh waved the suggestion aside. “As do most young men.”

  “He has other habits as well. I hate to be the one carrying tales, but surely you’ve heard some of the things that are being said—of vices and predilections, and indecent, immoral needs far beyond the realm of decent gentlemen.”

  Tanner felt himself smile in the dark—it was getting down right vicious down there, with all the veiled barbs flying about.

  Just the way he liked it.

  “Wild oats, which are neither here nor there. He will be Hadleigh, for God’s sake. Family is destiny. The marquessate is too important to let his petty faults get in the way.”

  Tanner had heard such tripe for years, ever since the first moment he had set foot at Eton. But he knew without a doubt that a man was only what he could make of himself. The measure of a man was how he treated those who could do him no benefit—how he treated his fellow man when no one else but God was looking.

  The Earl Sanderson felt at least partially the same way. “It is very much here, Hadleigh. Very much. His faults are vices that are by no means petty. People will talk, even if it is in whispers.”

  Hadleigh absorbed that blow, and struck another. “Yes, they will talk. And they will talk about young ladies, and they will ruin their reputations with far more viciousness than they will talk about healthy young men who live in the world. She will not be forgiven so easily. I can start talk far beyond what I have already.”

  Beside him, Claire went absolutely, lividly still with hot rage—he could feel it singing off her skin.

  “So is that the real transaction here, Hadleigh? My daughter marries your son, or you will make it even more of your business to further sully her name?”

  Hadleigh smiled like a wolf who thinks he has concerned his prey. “You put it so undiplomatically.”

  “It is an undiplomatic offer, sir,” the earl said bluntly.

  “Let us hope your answer is not undiplomatic.”

  “My answer to this proposal is the same as to the last.”

  Hadleigh stiffened, but his shoulders eased slightly when the earl went on.

  “Your son will have to put his proposal to my daughter. And then we shall see if she will have him.”

  “I will never have him,” Claire’s whisper was low and fierce. “Never. I want you to go right now to Lambeth Palace and get a special license. I—”

  Tanner pulled her back deeper into the shadows, and spoke low into her ear. “You have nothing to fear. Your father said it was your choice. And it’s Doctor’s Commons for the Special License. And I’ve already sent my man.”

  The thought seemed to calm her. She nodded against his chest and relaxed the grip she had taken on his arm. “Thank you.”

  “But do not mistake my hesitation for approval, my lord”—below, Sanderson’s voice was as clear and sharp as a shard of glass— “The spare fact of the matter is that I don’t, in any way, want to be connected to you.”

  Hadleigh put up his chin. “Be careful where you make enemies, Sanderson. You ought to know I have power.”

  “I have seen and felt your power, Hadleigh. And I want none of it. I want nothing to do with you, and I especially want nothing to do with what I have come to understand are counterfeited gold coins.”

  Hadleigh was livid, but his voice betrayed the first real glimpse of honest fear. “Who told you that? Come man, I gave you the coin to authenticate.”

  “One coin, Hadleigh, does not evidence of a large hoard make. And it is a small world we live in. And people will talk. People in Mayfair talk to people in the City. And people in the City talk to people in St. Catherine’s Dock.”

  The earl’s statement was met with livid, hostile silence. And then Hadleigh spoke so low, and so heated that Tanner had to strain to hear the words.

  “I will bury you.”

  The Earl Sanderson did not so much as flinch—he looked up to the very top of the ornate spiral staircase, and looked Tanner straight in the eye.

  And answered Hadleigh. “You may try.”

  Chapter 22

  Tanner shut the door carefully, even after the two antagonists had gone.

  “Your father loves you,” he told Claire. “I just thought you should know that.”

  “I do know that. But I thank you anyway.”

  Claire wrapped her arms around him, and his brain went all but blank. She was soft and sweet and pliant beside him, and he wanted more than anything else in the world—more than being clever, and more than finding justice—to kiss her.

  His body all but vibrated, as if he were a tuning fork that only she knew exactly how to strike. Her very presence sent bursts of unhelpful sensations careering through his brain, disrupting his thought processes, hindering his progress and abilities.

  And he liked it. He liked her. She was his. At least for as long as she offered herself to him.

  And offering she was—her wide blue eyes shining up at him. Looking at him in that soft, unfathomable way. Inviting him to lower his head and kiss her.

  She was exquisite. And never more so than now, when she was flushed and naturally beautiful, and unadorned with all the usual adornments.

  There he was repeating words. It was illogical. It was atypical. He didn’t like it.

  Oh, but he liked her.

  He couldn’t be in the same room, the same city, the same world as her, and not want to be with her. Not want to kiss her.

  And so he did.

  He framed her extraordinary face with his hands, brushing aside the strands of silken blond hair that had fallen loose from her pins, and kissed her. Long and slow and sweet. Taking his time. Feeling pleasure and ease and satisfaction seep all the way into his bones.

  She was soft and smelled of gardenia in the hollows behind her ear, and he wanted to lick the sweetness of her skin. He wanted to consume her whole.

  He wanted to run his fingers through her extraordinary hair, and scatter the pins to the ground, and spread it out glistening gold against the linen on his bed.

  But there were things that needed to be done. Dots that needed to be connected. Thoughts that needed to be organized, whirling around the cage of his brain.

  “Cl
aire. Before you fall completely under the spell of my skill at kissing—”

  “Oh, you’re not particularly skilled at kissing. I’ve had better.”

  He was so disconcerted by that particular backhanded insult that he stopped kissing.

  “But now that we’re not kissing anymore,” she said as if they had be drinking tea, or eating biscuits, or doing anything other than kissing. “I have something in particular that I want to tell you—it just came to me. Also, I had another thing that I wanted to tell you as well. And the two things are related—indeed that is the whole reason I sought you out.”

  He hadn’t cared, or thought she needed a reason to search him out—he only cared that she had.

  But she went on. “This afternoon I talked with one of the maids, as you do.” She fluttered her hands in front of her in a gesture meant to intimate female-ish things. “You will not credit this—”

  “Then why are you telling me”—he really did like this teasing her—“if you know I will not credit it?”

  “Because it is a turn of phrase intended to make you sit up and listen attentively. So please do listen attentively, Tanner, because I think I have figured it all out.”

  She had? But he was more than intrigued, and nodded, very politely, and said. “Just so.”

  “You were right about them being invisible—the servants. And it frightens them now to feel that they’ve been seen, that someone amongst them has been killed. But the girl I was talking to—Nancy Parker, who is but fifteen—said most of the guests never even notice when they are near. Just as we found when we were dressed as servants.”

  “But Parker said she was going up that servants staircase we were just examining, last night, when she heard someone coming down. And her being one of the lower servants, she pulled back into the passing alcove, as she’d been taught, especially because she could see it was a man—a guest, a ‘toff,’ she said—going down. And he was carrying someone all wrapped up in a white ladies evening cloak. And now I fear that must have been Maisy’s body he was carrying down.”

  Tanner was all attention now, the gears in his brain whirring and falling into place like well-oiled tumblers in a lock. “Did she recognize him?”

  “She did.”

  Clever, clever girl to have asked. He had never admired her more. “Tell me it was Rosing.”

  “I am afraid I must disappoint us both—it was not Rosing.”

  The urge to smash his fist into the nearest wall rose like a rogue wave from within, nearly propelling him up, and out the God damned window.

  There seemed to be this insurmountable wall in his brain, between what he knew ought to have happened, and the evidence from Maisy Carter’s own hand.

  He had to find the way through the wall. He had to.

  And then Claire said, “The man was Rosing’s father—the Marquess of Hadleigh.”

  And there it was, a way right over the wall.

  “Ah.”

  His Grace of Tanner went entirely still, the moonlight streaming through the dormer windows illuminating his tousled head like a Renaissance saint’s halo. “Now I have to rethink everything.”

  He brought up his hands in a little steeple in front of his mouth, and drummed his fingers against his lips as if it helped him to think.

  She stilled his fingers. “Not everything. Just the part from that closet upstairs.”

  In her excitement, she gripped his fingers hard, but he didn’t care—he was all sharp attentiveness.

  So she went on, “The maid—Nancy Parker—said that she told Mrs. Dalgliesh what she had seen, because it didn’t seem right his being there, and the housekeeper said to keep her thoughts to herself, as it was only Lord Hadleigh taking home his mistress, Mrs. Worthington, who had become ill from too much drink. Said she—that is Nancy said Mrs. Dalgliesh said she knew it was Lady Worthington from her white evening cloak. But—and this is the damning bit—the housemaids swore Lady Worthington, who was supposed to have been taken ill, was still in the ballroom dancing until the party broke up when Hadleigh raised a hew and cry when he found Lord Peter.”

  She was nearly out of breath from her tumbling narrative. “So it had to have been Maisy he was carrying. What do you think of that?”

  “I think, Lady Claire Jellicoe, that you are the cleverest women I have ever had the good fortune to meet.”

  “Oh, I do so hope I am.” She was entirely pleased with this fact. “And so are you. Or whatever the male equivalent is. Listening at doors as if you’re quite practiced in the art. Scandalous.”

  “Absolutely. I’ll be a scandal and you can be the enigma. Beauty as well as intelligence. Which puts you beyond the reach of all mere mortals.”

  She smiled at that—how could she not? It was a compliment for the ages. Especially since he sounded so aggravated admitting it. “Thank you, Your Grace. I live to serve.”

  That tease brought him up short. He reached out to put his hand overs hers where she still held his, as if he could pass some of his vehemence to her.

  But his words were soft kindness itself. “You should live to be, Claire. Live just to be your own, lovely self.”

  He was being his own self, deep and blunt and profound. And most endearing.

  “But the truth is, Your Grace, that I am my best self when I am helping others. Rather poor spirited of me, I might suppose, but quite, quite true. But helping others need not be onerous. I like helping you.”

  He looked away for a moment, out the open window over the river, as if he were trying to avoid responding.

  But he could not be untrue to himself. He had to speak the truth. Even if it cost him. “I like when you help me.”

  “Good. For I should very much like to continue to do so.”

  His eyes came straight to her, that dark blue-gray of the fathomless ocean. “Do you truly?”

  “Do you know me so little still, that you think I would lie about such a thing.”

  “I think I know you well enough, to think that you are generous to a fault, and commit to things which you might regret later.”

  “I have not regretted one instant of our time together.” Of this she was now sure. “Well, perhaps the circumstances of our first instants together. But not the second. Because, had you not come to me—and you did come to me, did you not? You came there, to the boathouse, for the direct purpose of saving me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I am glad for it. All of it. For I don’t think I should ever have met you, otherwise. I should never have had the courage to ask to be introduced. And that would have been the greatest loss of all, never having met you. All the trouble has been worth it to know you.”

  “My God, Claire. That is the most generous speech I think I have ever heard anyone make. You have suffered terribly, and yet you are still so generous. My God.”

  He ran his hands through his hair in a gesture of rumpled frustration. “Your father said it, and I know it is true—I am not worth of such a prize.”

  “You will have to let me be the judge of that, Your Grace.”

  “I will let you be the judge of everything, Claire. If only you will stop calling me Your Grace.”

  He was so, so dear. “All right then, Tanner.”

  “And I must ask you to stop talking in this familiar manner, for if you do not, I fear I shall very much have to kiss you again.”

  She hoped her smile was blindingly brilliant. “I was rather hoping you would.”

  “You, Lady Claire Jellicoe,” he said as he tugged her hand to bring her nearer, “are a very clever minx.”

  “Your poor Grace of Tanner. Are you only just discovering that?”

  “Yes. But as you have noted, my dear Lady Claire, I very much like discovery.”

  Their lips met alone in the middle of space, in the middle of the room, in the middle of the night.

  She leaned toward him just as he leaned toward her, balancing themselves carefully, holding themselves in quivering check, lest they disrupt their tenuous concl
usions with their rising passions.

  And passions there were—the moment his lips met hers, she fell into the kiss just as if she were falling into a dream plunging in head first, tumbling weightless in the dark silken pleasure.

  He moved to angle his head, turning to fit himself to her, so she could take the taut, pillowed curve of his lower lip between hers, and taste the brandied tang of his mouth.

  She closed her eyes, and opened to him on a sigh. But she was not passive, she did not wait for him to pleasure her. She took what she wanted as well, kissing and licking and nipping and sucking with fervor and skill and abandon, until he was on his knees before her.

  “Claire.”

  “Yes.” She was looping her arm around his neck, tethering herself to him so he could hold her the way she wanted to be held.

  But he set her away, and looked serious. “I need to say, before there are any more fathers, and lawyers, and men of business, and representatives to estates, that I would be honored—deeply, wholly honored—if you would consent to be my wife. I wanted you to know—you alone—that I should like nothing more.”

  Claire did not answer too quickly. She did not say, “yes,” or “of course.” She was equal to the honor of the moment, and only nodded and took his hands between hers.

  “I want to do it properly,” he said in another uncharacteristic rush. “Before anyone starts any nonsense about scandal, and having to marry because it’s the right thing. It is the right thing, but I’m the Duke of Fenmore, Claire. No one could make me do anything that I don’t want to do. So I wanted you to know that I do want to marry you. I do want it, with all my heart.”

  “So do I.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  “I’d like to meet your sister. Perhaps we should invite her for the wedding?”

  “Then there will be a wedding, will there not?”

  She was so happy she could only nod, and he surged to his feet to kiss her again to seal their bargain.

  “Thank God, Claire, because I very much fear I love you.”