“Dead?” Jack stared at Denys through the doorway of his suite at the Park Avenue Hotel, numb and disbelieving. “Van Hausen’s dead?”
He glanced past Denys’s shoulder to James, who stood behind the other man in the corridor, but even at James’s confirming nod, Jack still wasn’t quite able to take it in. “Are you sure?”
“Quite sure.” Denys gestured to the half-opened door. “Shall you let us in? Or shall we discuss it in the corridor?”
“Sorry.” Jack shook his head to clear his dazed senses and opened the door wide. “But this sort of news rather gives one a shock.”
“I daresay,” James said as he followed Denys into the suite. “Imagine how we feel after being questioned for two hours by the Newport police.”
“Police?” Nicholas, in Jack’s suite to assist with last-minute preparations for the shareholders meeting on the morrow, rose from his chair. “Was foul play involved?”
“No.” Denys tossed his hat onto one end of the sofa opposite Nick and sat down at the other end. “It was suicide right enough.”
James brushed Denys’s hat aside, tossed his own on top of it, and sank down beside the other man on the sofa, then looked at Jack. “He put a gun in his mouth late this afternoon.”
Jack’s mind formed the picture, and though he savored that justice had been done, he couldn’t help feeling there was something wrong about it, and he didn’t understand that at all. That despicable violator of women was dead. What more did he want?
Arrest, trial, prison—those things would have caused Van Hausen to experience humiliation, disgrace, and vast personal pain—a bit, at least, of what he’d visited on his victims. Now, with a simple shot to the head, he had escaped all justice of mortal men, and though Jack believed in God, he found the idea of handing justice over to God profoundly unsatisfying. “Damn you, Van Hausen, for taking the easy way out,” he muttered to himself, feeling a wave of resentment. “You coward.”
“Jack?” Nicholas’s voice intruded. “Did you say something?”
“No.” Jack took deep breath and forced himself out of this strange reverie. Van Hausen’s death, quick as it had been, was satisfaction enough. “Does anyone want a drink?”
“Yes,” the other three said in unison.
Having given his valet, Maguire, the evening off, Jack poured four glasses of bourbon and brought them to the men gathered at the other end of the sitting room. His own drink in hand, he took the chair beside Nick and faced the two men on the sofa. “Why did the police question you two?”
It was Denys who answered. “They were curious to know how East Africa Mines was involved with his money troubles.”
“The inquest is Thursday,” James added, “but it’s just a formality. One of us will have to attend and offer testimony regarding East Africa Mines.”
“I’ll do it,” Nicholas offered. “The three of you have done yeoman’s duty on this already, especially Jack. I’ll stay, and the rest of you can go home.”
Home? Jack looked up, nonplussed. Home for him was a cheap flat on Paris’s left bank, living hard and fast among the bohemians. And he’d had a smashing good time doing that in the old days, when Nick had shared the flat with him, and Denys and James had often come to visit. Even Stuart had managed to make the long journey from Africa once a year for a few weeks of carousing. But Stuart and Edie had reconciled, Nick was married and running a brewery with Denys, and James was starting to talk about finding a wife. Paris wasn’t what it used to be.
He took a swallow of bourbon and glanced at the two men opposite. “Did you send word to Stuart?”
Both Denys and James shook their heads, but it was James who spoke. “We thought, since you’ve been his first lieutenant on this mission, you ought to be the one to do it.”
Jack nodded. “I’ll write him tomorrow.” He paused, glancing at his companions. “Any regrets, gentlemen?”
“None,” Nicholas said at once, a reply that was followed by equally definitive answers from the other two.
“It’s over then.” With those words, Jack felt strangely bereft. For a year, he’d had just one purpose, and now he had none. The realization brought a hint of panic.
He’d always been a carefree sort, ready for any amount of adventure but not one to be pinned down. He’d never spent much time planning his future or brooding about his past. No, he’d always lived very much in the present. So why did Van Hausen’s death bring this feeling of emptiness? Why did the idea of returning to Paris and his former life leave him utterly cold?
Because, he realized in astonishment, he’d changed. Whether because of this mission, or just the passage of time, he wasn’t the same fun-loving chap he used to be, and he had no desire to go back to his Paris days. But what else was there? With Van Hausen dead, he felt as if he’d been cut adrift, and the future that loomed ahead seemed without purpose.
But that, he reminded himself, wasn’t quite true. He had a new task ahead of him: not the ruin of a man, but the redemption of a woman’s honor. And with that woman, he’d be building a new life.
“You don’t have to attend the inquest, Nick,” he said. “I’ll do it.”
“But you’ve done so much already,” his friend objected.
“I can’t return to England yet anyway. There’s Miss Holland to consider.”
Nicholas gave him a blank look. “Who is Miss Holland?”
Denys answered before Jack had a chance. “Jack’s fiancée. That is,” he added, overriding Nick’s sound of astonishment and giving Jack a questioning glance, “if he still means to go through with it?”
“I do.” Jack took a swallow of bourbon. “Does she know Van Hausen’s dead?”
Denys and James both shrugged, but it was Denys who spoke. “The news wasn’t in the evening papers. Too late in the day, I expect. When the police finished questioning us, we caught the last train and came straight here. Someone might have telephoned her, I suppose, but it wasn’t one of us.”
“Wait,” Nicholas interjected, holding up his hand. “Jack is engaged? Our Jack?” He glanced around. “This has to be a joke.”
“If so, the joke’s on Jack,” Denys told him. “Miss Holland isn’t his fiancée, not yet. But she is a beautiful woman of excellent taste who refused his proposal and called him a toad.”
At Nick’s chortle of laughter, Jack felt impelled to set the matter straight. “That’s not what she said. What she said was that she’d rather marry a toad.”
James grinned. “Either way, her emphatic refusal and her opinion of you will make winning her over quite a challenge.”
“There’s nothing I like better,” he replied, displaying an air of bravado he didn’t feel in the least. After all, a man had to put up a good show in front of his friends. “Besides,” he added with dignity, “in the fable, the toad was a handsome prince all along. He just had to make the girl see it.”
Of course, in the Grimm story, the toad’s magical transformation had taken place after he’d slept in the girl’s bed, an occurrence that in Jack’s case seemed an even dimmer prospect than it had for the frog. Thankfully, his friends did not point that out.
THOUGH JACK HAD compared his courtship of Miss Holland to a fairy tale, he was reminded on the following day that courtship in real life wasn’t quite so simple.
“She’s left town?” He stared at Ephraim Holland across the other man’s study in astonishment. He’d steeled himself for her grief, her condemnation, or the possibility that she’d refuse to see him, but the idea that she’d flee had never entered his mind. Granted, he knew little about the girl he intended to wed, but he did know she was no coward. “But she only just arrived.”
“I’m not sure how her departure concerns you, Lord Featherstone.” Holland resumed his seat behind a massive mahogany desk and beckoned Jack forward to take one of the leather chairs opposite him. “If you’ve come to impart the news of Van Hausen’s death, we’ve already been told. Suicide, I understand?” At Jack’s nod, he added, “I c
an’t say I’m surprised.”
Jack studied the other man’s face, noting the shrewd eyes and cynical mouth, and he suspected there wasn’t much that surprised Ephraim Holland. “I felt I ought to be the one to tell your family of his death. I didn’t realize you already knew.”
“We were at breakfast this morning when Prescott Dewey telephoned to give us the news.”
“I hope . . .” He paused and took a deep breath. “I hope your daughter was not too overcome by grief?”
“She was shocked, of course. But grieved? No, I wouldn’t say so. Given the circumstances, she could hardly be expected to grieve.”
“It would not be reasonable,” Jack agreed. “But women’s hearts are seldom reasonable. Might I ask where she has gone?”
“She and her mother departed for England this morning.”
“England?” Jack jerked upright in his chair, dismayed. “With her reputation in jeopardy and no engagement between us announced? What is she thinking?”
“May I remind you there is no engagement? She refused you.”
“You are mistaken if you think one refusal would deter me.”
Holland tilted his head, giving Jack an assessing look. “Most men would not be so punctilious. At this point, they would deem honor satisfied. They’d shrug off any further sense of responsibility and go on their way.”
“I don’t know what another man would do, but I believe if I break something, it’s my responsibility to repair it.”
Something flickered in Holland’s eyes. It might have been a hint of respect. He straightened in his chair. “Let’s lay our cards on the table. I don’t like you, Featherstone.”
“Quite so. There’s no reason why you should.”
“My wife, however, has a better opinion of you than I. But then, she would. She has a soft spot for men with titles.”
Jack managed a smile. “I wish your wife had demonstrated her good opinion by telling me what was in the wind before she took Miss Holland to England.”
“In defense of my wife, I believe she did write to you before they departed for the pier. I imagine the letter will be at your hotel by morning. Either way, in light of Linnet’s refusal, her mother has rather given up on you.”
“I see. You do realize the longer an announcement of our engagement is delayed, the greater the scandal will become.”
“Yes. Mind you, marriage to a British peer is not what I’d choose for my daughter. I have never desired to support a useless institution like the British aristocracy with my hard-earned dollars. I would prefer my daughter marry an American.”
“Yes, a certain Davis MacKay, I believe?”
“Davis, at least, is a young man who believes in hard work and self-determination, not the entitlement you British lords espouse. I’ve been asking about you, Featherstone, and it seems your family in particular has seen itself as quite entitled, at least when it comes to American money.”
Jack wondered with a hint of despair if the profligacy and debauchery of other members of his family were going to haunt his entire life. “True. My brother married an American heiress, and spent her fortune into oblivion before he died. But Charles always was a rotter, even when we were boys. And our father was no better. He also married for money. And his father. Most of my ancestors have been inveterate gamblers, notorious skirt-chasers, and fortune-hunting cads. In examining my family tree, I fear we should have to go all the way back to the third earl before we could find a man of honor and integrity.” He paused, meeting the other man’s eyes across the desk. “Until now.”
“That’s an easy thing to say, but given your actions, not particularly creditable.”
“I realize that, but it’s no less true. As for feeling a sense of entitlement, I don’t. I’m a second son, you see, and I was raised to understand that I wasn’t entitled to a damn thing. The fact that I became the earl was an accident of fate. It was also a responsibility I had no ability to assume.”
“Why? Because you’d rather carouse around Paris with dancing girls than do something useful?”
Jack gave a grim smile. “You have been asking about me. A title is only useful, sir, if a peer has the ability to run his estates and provide employment for the people of his village. I lack the capital to do that.”
“And you peers think it’s beneath you to earn a living.”
“The truth is more brutal. Most of us simply aren’t qualified to do anything. We have excellent educations—I’m an Eton and Cambridge man, myself. But our education teaches us nothing useful, certainly not anything so middle-class as earning a living. There’s the army, but one has to buy a commission, and my father refused. There’s also politics, if your family has influence and can put up the money for political campaigns. My family met neither of those criteria. Until I became the earl, the only money I ever had was doled out to me at the whim of my father, and after him, my brother, and both of them were far more inclined to spend their money on themselves than on me, which left me in a perpetual state of economic uncertainty, a circumstance both of them found quite entertaining, by the way.”
“I see. And when you became the earl?”
“I discovered that despite my family’s penchant for advantageous marriages, every shilling poured into the Featherstone coffers had been spent. I leased the houses to pay the interest on their mortgages, and land rents cover the expenses, with just enough left to give me a small income. Until I came to New York, I chose to live in Paris because it’s less expensive than London and less dull. As for the dancing girls . . .” He paused and shrugged. “Can you fault a bachelor for that?”
“You’ve never thought to marry before now?”
“I may be a Featherstone, but I’ve never regarded marrying well as a profession,” he said dryly. “And once a peer marries, he assumes a position in society that isn’t required of him as a bachelor. It’s hard to maintain that position and support a wife and children on seventy quid a month.”
“Yet you had enough capital to invest with Van Hausen?”
“I borrowed it from a friend. Investments are one of the few possibilities for a man in my position, which is why I came to New York. But now I’ve lost even that capital.”
“And yet, you could have allowed Linnet to become engaged to Van Hausen, and you would have at least gotten back your seed money. But you didn’t do that.” When Jack didn’t reply, Holland gave a sigh and sat back in his chair. “It’s clear you’re of no mind to explain your motives there, so I’ll come to the point.”
Jack didn’t know whether to be relieved or not.
“An alliance for my daughter with any man of our circle is off the table now. I offered to find an American husband for her outside our set, but she refused my help.” He raised his hands and let them fall, the gesture of a man who, despite vast wealth, success, intelligence, and strong will, found his daughter ungovernable. “After going at it hammer and tongs, I agreed to cooperate with her plans. She intends to accede to her mother’s ambitions at last and find a British peer to marry.”
Jack had enough masculine pride to feel annoyed. “She already has one British peer waiting in the wings. How many does she need?”
Holland picked up a pen on his desk and began toying with it in his fingers, giving him a wry look. “I believe her main criterion is that the man in question be any peer but you.”
“And you accept that?”
“What choice do I have? Would it be better to refuse the dowry and let her be ruined? Or should I lock her in the attic? I couldn’t talk her out of this, and it would be a waste of breath trying to convince her mother to do so. Thankfully, Linnet has plenty of sense. She knows she’ll need an ironclad marriage settlement and a man of decent character, so she intends to put herself in the hands of Lady Trubridge.”
“My sister-in-law?” Jack stared at the other man in dismay. “Your daughter intends to hire her to be her matchmaker?”
“Why shouldn’t she? Lady Trubridge, I’m told, is the most famous marriage
broker in England. The woman has made quite a name for herself arranging these transatlantic marriages.”
“Belinda doesn’t arrange marriages of convenience.”
“Since you are responsible for the situation, Linnet hopes Lady Trubridge will make an exception to that rule.”
Jack rubbed a hand over his forehead. He’d have to cable Belinda at once and give her an inkling of what was in the wind before the girl arrived. He’d also have to persuade his sister-in-law to take his side, and given what a dismal husband his late brother had been, that could be tricky.
Holland interrupted these contemplations by tossing his pen onto his desk. “Linnet thinks you did this for money. You might persuade her to accept you if you refuse a personal settlement.”
“And what would I do for an income? Be as dependent upon my wife as I was upon my brother?” He shook his head. “No. I don’t like accepting a dowry, but in making my estates into homes for Linnet and our children, I’ll lose my income from leasing the houses, and as small as it is, I must have an income of my own.”
“If you intend to marry into a wealthy American family, Lord Featherstone, you need to think bigger.”
He frowned. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“I mean, I’ll stake you a sum of your own outside the formal marriage settlement.” Holland leaned forward, clasping his hands on the desk top. “Say, half a million dollars?”
Jack stared at him, dumbfounded. “Why would you do that?”
“I’m a realistic man, and I know how to face facts, however repugnant they may be. Whatever your motives, Linnet has to marry because of you. It looks as if that man is going to be a Brit, you or some other. Given that you’re the one who ruined her, marrying you is less likely to leave a permanent stain on her reputation. And you did protect her, albeit in an unsavory way, from Van Hausen’s schemes.”
“Yes, I’m quite a hero.” Jack gave the other man a sardonic look. “Forgive me if I wait for the other shoe to drop.”
Catch a Falling Heiress: An American Heiress in London Page 10
