by Liz Carlyle
A Woman Scorned
Liz Carlyle
Prologue
The Golden Axe Falls In Brook Street
At the advanced age of seven-and-fifty, Henry Rowland, the sixth Marquis of Mercer, was still a fine figure of a man. His broad shoulders bespoke power, his hooked nose revealed arrogance, and his tightly clenched fist showed an implacable resolve. But above all things, his lordship’s appearance proclaimed wealth, for the marquessate of Mercer was an exceedingly rich one. Had there been any doubt— and among the two men present there was none—the issue might easily have been settled by a sweeping glance at Mercer’s dinner attire, which gave every impression of having been sewn to his skin.
His lordship was a big man, too, standing—under normal circumstances—just under six feet, with a trim waist and calves that were still long and muscled. Dr. Greaves let his gaze slide down those legs, and ended by studying Mercer’s perfectly shod feet. As with everything else his lordship wore, the shoes were the best Bond Street had to offer, with soles that were barely scuffed. Dr. Greaves could plainly see that, given his unusual vantage point.
“Indeed! Fine figure of a man,” proclaimed the doctor in a solemn, carrying voice.
Then, casting a furtive glance at the weeping woman in the adjoining sitting room, he poked out a tentative toe and gave Mercer a hearty shove with the tip of his boot. As he had been throughout the whole of his life, his lordship was unyielding.
“Bloody rigor mortis setting in,” grumbled the plump, elderly doctor. “Dead at least two hours, I daresay.”
“Good God, Greaves,” hissed the magistrate at his elbow. “Devil take you and your bad back! Get down on that damned carpet and do something!”
The doctor quirked a thick gray eyebrow. “And what, pray, would you have me do, Mr. Lyons? Lord Mercer is quite dead, you may be sure.”
“Blister it, Greaves! I want him examined properly,” the magistrate retorted, dropping to his knees on the carpet and striving to look solicitous. For the fourth time in an hour, Lyons felt for a pulse and found nothing. “Just be sure,” he insisted, glancing up from the floor. “Be unerringly sure that Mercer has been sent on to his great reward by natural causes, or the Home Office will make certain that I see mine sooner than I’d be pleased to!”
With a heaving grunt, Greaves lumbered down onto his knees on the floor of Lord Mercer’s opulent bedchamber and began a routine examination of the well-dressed corpse. His heavy but confident hands flew, lifting this, prodding that, and checking his lordship’s body for any indication of the cause of death. Nothing. Just as he had expected.
“Heart failure,” he grunted, shifting his weight to rise.
“Be certain,” the magistrate cautioned again, his voice a lethal whisper. “Other than a recent bilious complaint, Mercer was in perfect health.”
“Do you say so?” Greaves scowled. “He bloody well isn’t now, is he?”
Lyons sat back on his haunches and let his shoulders sag. Murder in Mayfair. He could hear the patter of avaricious street hawkers as they peddled their headlines up and down. Wearily, he sighed. “Look here, Greaves. According to the valet, his lordship suffered only minor complaints. Not a bit of him gone to fat. No excessive use of alcohol or tobacco.”
“Excessive whoring mayhap,” muttered the doctor, his tone barely audible.
“What?”
With a grim smile, Greaves looked up. “There was a New Year’s Eve dinner here last night, did you not say? By chance, was the indefatigable Mrs. Lanier in attendance? Perhaps the poor devil finally fucked himself to death.”
“Lord, you are disgusting, Greaves! Besides, he’s on the floor.”
The doctor shrugged in the way of men who have lived long and seen much.
“Mercer was not known to be overly discerning with regard to who, when, or where.”
“Look,” said Lyons, exasperated. “All I know is, accord ing to the valet, there was one hell of a row downstairs last night—and loud enough for the watchman to hear when he passed by at eleven. And plenty of other witnesses, too. Wellborn witnesses, if you take my meaning.” He jerked his head toward the young couple seated together inside the sitting room, their heads leaned companionably together.
“Care to hazard a guess as to what it might have been about?”
“Have you any proof?” asked Greaves, his attention suddenly engaged.
“Not precisely,” Lyons hedged. “Though I cannot help but wonder why Lord Delacourt is already here, consoling the grieving widow. The arrogant bastard showed up not five minutes after I did, behaving as though he already owned the place. Which I daresay he now has every hope of doing!”
“Do not be ridiculous, Lyons,” argued the doctor. “This house and everything in it now belongs to a nine-year-old child. Lord Stuart Rowland is the new Marquis of Mercer.”
“Hmph!” said Lyons, his gaze fixed upon the living room sofa. The lovely Lady Mercer chose just that moment to sob, loudly and deeply, as if her very life had ended. She then fell into Lord Delacourt’s embrace, her perfect nose pressed into his elegant lapel. “lust look at that, Greaves! For whom is this little charade enacted, eh? All of society knows she hated her husband.”
“Perhaps not without reason,” said the doctor softly. With a strong tug, he rolled the body over onto its side to check for some sort of exit wound. Not that one could expect any, when there was no entry wound. There was no wound of any sort. No blood. Not even so much as a good conk on the sconce from the force of his fall. Apparently, the marquis’s head was as hard as his heart had reputedly been.
“No wound, is there?”
Greaves shook his head. “None. Tell me, who else knows of this?” He let Mercer flop back gracelessly.
“I cannot say,” answered Lyons. “All of the household, certainly. According to the chambermaid, she came up at half past three to stir the fire, believing her master to be downstairs. A bit of a suspicious tale, that. In any event, she set off the hue and cry, and someone snared the watchman just as he was going off duty.”
Greaves pulled down Mercer’s lower lip and studied the color of his gums.
“Hmm,” he said. “And then what did the watchman do? Touch anything? Move anything?” Lyons looked at him hi exasperation. “Good God, Greaves! The man was going off duty. What do you think he did? He dropped this muddle into the lap of the constable, who in turn sent for me. And here I am. Doing about as much good as either of those lack-wits would have done, I daresay.”
With his broad thumb, Greaves rolled back first one, and then the other eyelid, to study the pupils of the corpse, trying without much success to bestir a bit of sympathy. Still, the man was dead, and one could hardly ignore the fact. But Greaves could not see into the sitting room. He jerked his head in that direction.
“Look, Lyons—what is Lady Mercer doing now?”
Lyons flicked an anxious glance through the half-open doorway and snorted. “Still hanging upon Lord Delacourt’s every word, so far as I can see. The blackguard still has hold of her hands. Both of them.”
“Then shut the door and let me examine the body further,” whispered the doctor, deftly stripping away Mercer’s cravat “Pray God you are wrong, Lyons, but perhaps there is something more to this. There is an odd color about him which I cannot like. Mercer was the devil himself, may God rest his soul. Nonetheless, if it isn’t his heart, I suppose we must know the truth.”
“You may rest assured that everyone else will know it,” complained the magistrate bitterly, getting up to close the door which led into Lady Mercer’s sitting room. “I hold my job by patronage, and I damned well mean to keep it And even as we dawdle here, some scullery maid or bootboy is already halfway to the Times with this nasty tale.”
�
��Yes, yes!” grumbled Greaves. “A little grisly excitement for the masses.”
“I don’t give a damn about the masses, Greaves. It is the Home Secretary who concerns me. He’ll have my head on a pike when he hears that a peer may have been murdered in my parish, and we do not know by whom, nor even how.” Lyons crossed the carpet toward Greaves, pausing briefly by his lordship’s cluttered dressing table. “Blast it, Mercer died of something, and I should prefer to know what it was before every rag in town gets hold of the news!”
“As should I, Mr. Lyons,” murmured the doctor, absently scratching his balding pate. “As should I.”
When the magistrate made no further answer, Greaves crooked his head upward to look at him, noting as he did so the empty wineglass Lyons now held deftly between two fingers. The magistrate held the glass aloft and stared through the ruby dregs, then hesitantly poked his nose into the mouth of the glass, inhaling deeply.
“What have you there?” grumbled the doctor, curiosity warring with irritation.
Lyons merely sniffed again, then squinted at the bowl, studying it intently. “Damned if I know, Greaves,” he muttered uneasily, his starkly intense gaze suddenly catching and holding the doctor’s. “Damned if I know.”
Chapter 1
A Brave Officer Is Tactically Deployed
London’s spring weather was at its most seasonable, which merely meant it was both wet and chilly, when Captain Cole Amherst rolled up the collar on his heavy greatcoat and stepped out of his modest bachelor establishment in Red lion Street Mindful of having lived through worse, Amherst glanced up and down the busy lane, then stepped boldly down to join the rumbling wheels and spewing water as carts and carriages sped past. The air was thick with street smells; damp soot, warm horse manure, and the pervasive odor of too many people.
A few feet along, the footpath narrowed, and a man in a long drab coat pushed past Cole, his head bent to the rain, his hat sodden. Skillfully, Cole stepped over the ditch, which gurgled with filthy water, and was almost caught in the spray of a passing hackney coach. Jumping back onto the path, Cole briefly considered hailing the vehicle, then stubbornly reconsidered. Instead, he pulled his hat brim low, then set a brisk, westerly pace along the cobbled footpath, ignoring the blaze of pain in the newly knit bone of his left thigh.
The long walk to Mayfair, he resolved, would do him nothing but good. The rain did not let up, but it was less than two miles to Mount Street, and just a few short yards beyond lay the towering brick townhouse to which he had been so regally summoned. It often seemed to Amherst that he had been summoned just so— without regard to his preference or schedule—on a hundred other such occasions over the last twenty-odd years. But one thing had changed. He now came only out of familial duty, not fainthearted dread.
“Good evening, Captain,” said the young footman who greeted him at the door. “A fit night for neither man nor beast, is it, sir?”
“Evening, Findley.” Cole grinned, tossed the young man his sodden hat, then slid out of his coat. “Speaking of beasts, kindly tell my uncle that I await his pleasure.”
———
The desk inside Lord James Rowland’s study was as wide as ever, its glossy surface stretching from his vast belly and rolling forward, seemingly into infinity. This effect was particularly disconcerting when one was a child and compelled to look at a great many things in life from a different angle.
Cole remembered it well, for he had spent a goodly portion of his youth staring across that desk while awaiting some moralizing lecture, or the assignment of some petty task his uncle wished to have done. It had been difficult to refuse James, when Cole knew that his uncle had been under no obligation to foster his wife’s orphaned nephew, and had done so only to allay her tears.
But Cole was no longer a child, and had long ago put away his childish things, along with most of his hopes and his dreams. The ingenuous boy who had passed the first eleven years of his life in a quiet Cambridgeshire vicarage was no more. Even the callow youth his aunt and uncle had helped raise was long dead. And now, Cole could barely remember the gentleman and scholar that the youth had eventually become.
There were few memories, Cole had found, which were worth clinging to. Now, at the age of four-and-thirty, Cole was just a soldier. He liked the simplicity of it, liked being able to see clearly his path through life. There were no instructors, no vicars, no uncles to be pleased. Now, he served only the officers above him and took care of those few soldiers below whom fate had entrusted into his care. What few hard lessons the rigors of military training had foiled to teach him, the cruelty of battle had inculcated. Cole felt as if his naivete’ had been tempered in the fires of hell and had come out as something much stronger. Pragmatism, perhaps?
But the war was over. Now that he had returned to England, Cole opened his uncle’s rather dictatorial messages only when it suited him to do so, presented himself in Mount Street if he had the time, and ppeased the old man if it pleased him to. Although in truth his uncle was not an old man—he merely chose to behave like one. What was he now? Perhaps five-and-fifty? It was hard to be certain, for like well-aged firewood, James Rowland had long ago been seasoned-—but by presupposed duty, supreme haughtiness, and moral superiority rather than wind and weather.
Abruptly, as if determined to throw off the insult of age, Lord James Rowland leapt from his desk and began to pace. He stopped briefly, just long enough to seize a paper from his desk and shove it into Cole’s hands. “Damn it, Cole! Just look at that, if you please! How dare she? I ask you, how dare she?”
“Who, my lord?” murmured Cole, quickly scanning the advertisement. His eyes caught on a few words. Established household... Mayfair... seeks highly educated tutor... two young gentlemen, aged nine and seven... philosophy, Greek, mathematics... Lord James drew up behind him and thrust a jabbing finger over Cole’s shoulder.
“My Scottish whore of a sister-in-law, that is who!” He tapped at the paper, very nearly ripping it from Cole’s grasp. “That—that murderess thinks to subvert my authority. She has returned from her flight to Scotland—she and that insolent cicisbeo of hers—and now has had the audacity to dismiss every good English servant in that house.” The jabbing finger shot toward the north end of town.
“Uncle, I hardly think ‘murderess’ is a fair desc—” James cut him off, slamming his palm onto the desktop and sending a quill sailing, unnoticed, into the floor. “She has cast off good family retainers like an old coat—turned them off with nothing, belike —then fetched down two carriageloads of her own servants! Hauled them all the way from the Highlands like so many sheep, mind you! And fixed them in Brook Street as if she owns the bloody place! And now—look here!”
Cole lifted his brows in mild curiosity. “What?” James jabbed at the paper again.
“She means to employ a tutor, and deny me my right to see that his young lordship is properly educated. Upon my word, Cole, I’ll not have it! The titular head of this family must be suitably schooled. And it cannot be done without my advice and concurrence, for I am the trustee and guardian of both those children.”
Cole swallowed back a wave of bile at his uncle’s words. So it was a “proper education” that James sought for his wards. Did he, perhaps, wish to see the young lords ensconced as lowly Collegers, as Cole himself had been? Was that still James’s preferred method of fulfilling his family duty? To cart sheltered boys off to the cold beds and sparse tables of Eton, where they might subsist on scholarship, and survive by their fists?
Cole trembled with anger at the prospect But it was none of his business. He had survived it. And so would they. “I take it we are discussing Lady Mercer?” he dryly replied, bending over to retrieve his uncle’s quill.
“Bloody well right we are,” answered Lord James, his voice stern. “And that is why I have called you here, Cole. I require your assistance.”
His assistance? Oh no. He would not back a bird in this mess of a cockfight. He wanted nothing to do with the Row
land family. The young Marquis of Mercer meant nothing to him. Cole was merely related to the family by marriage, a fact his cousin Edmund Rowland had always been quick to point out, since it was crucial that the dynasty keep their lessers in their proper places. Well fine! Then why must he suffer through an account of the machinations of Lady Mercer?
Her husband’s suspicious death had nothing to do with Captain Cole Amherst Lord Mercer’s lovely young widow might be Lucrezia Borgia for all he knew—or cared.
Certainly many people held her in about that much esteem. And while they had liked her late husband even less, in death there was always veneration, no matter how wicked or deceitful the deceased had been in life. Yes, Lady Mercer’s life was probably a living hell, but Cole needed to know nothing further of it.
“I am afraid, my lord, that I can be of no help to you,” Cole said coolly. “I do not know the lady, and one cannot presume to advise—”
“Quite right!” interjected his uncle sharply. “I need no advice! I daresay I know my duty to the orphans of this family, sir. You, above all people, ought to know that per fectly well.”
Ditty. Orphan. Such ugly, dreary words, and yet they summed up the whole of his uncle’s commitment to him. He could almost see young Lord Mercer and his brother being locked up in the Long Chamber of Eton now. Cole bit back a hasty retort.
“With all due respect, uncle, these children are hardly orphans. Their mother yet lives, and shares guardianship with you, I believe?”
“Yes,” Lord James hissed. “Though what Mercer meant by appointing us jointly defies all logic! That woman—of all people!”
Inwardly, Cole had to laugh. He rather suspected that Lord Mercer had known better than to circumvent his wife’s parental authority altogether. From what Cole had heard, her ladyship was capable of flying in the face of any authority or command. Indeed, the woman whom half the ton referred to as the Sorceress of Strathdyde was reputedly capable of anything. Had the provisions of her dead husband’s will displeased her, she would simply have set her pack of slavering solicitors at James’s throat.
