Too Hot to Handel

by Sheri Cobb South

  “I’ll be leaving you now, my lady. Unless,” he lowered his voice, “you are quite certain you do not want me to stay?”

  “Thank you, Mr. Colquhoun, but I am quite certain.”

  “Very well, then. Good luck to you.” He gave her hands a reassuring little squeeze, and left her alone to confront her late husband’s disapproving relations.

  “Won’t you come in?” Julia urged the trio, gesturing toward the bedroom door. “I have been closing this room off in order to keep it as warm as possible.”

  “I have come to put a stop to this nonsense once and for all,” the viscount informed her roundly, following her into the bedroom where Pickett lay. “Gather whatever things you may have brought here, and we shall go. The carriage is waiting below.”

  She sat on the edge of Pickett’s bed and gestured for her unwelcome visitors to take a seat. “I have already explained to you, George, why that is quite impossible.”

  He plopped down onto the middle one of the three straight chairs, then waited until his ladies had taken their seats on either side of him before announcing, “You are making yourself ridiculous, Cousin Julia!”

  “Am I? But I suspect it is not my appearing ridiculous, but yours that is your primary concern.”

  “Never mind that! It is your responsibility as a Fieldhurst to—”

  The moment had come. She took Pickett’s unresponsive hand in both of hers and clutched it tightly, drawing strength from his weakness. “But I am not a Fieldhurst, not anymore. I am Mrs. John Pickett.”

  “My smelling salts!” The dowager viscountess fumbled in her reticule for her vinaigrette, then raised the tiny silver filigree box to her nose and sniffed its aromatic contents.

  “Yes, so Mr. Crumpton informs me.” Lord Fieldhurst reached into his coat and extracted a folded paper. “I have here a letter to Mr. Crumpton—”

  Julia sighed. “I rather thought you might.”

  “It is purportedly from you, although I find it almost impossible to believe that even you would take so foolhardy a step. It says you intend to drop the annulment proceedings and remain married to this—this—” Words failed him.

  “This man, George. I realize the concept might be foreign to you, but Mr. Pickett is a man.”

  The viscount shot to his feet and began to pace. “Damn it, Julia, I’ll not have it! Frederick must be spinning in his grave!”

  At the mention of her murdered son, the dowager Lady Fieldhurst blew her nose loudly into a black-bordered handkerchief. Still, the beady eyes glaring at Julia over the delicate folds of cambric were sufficient to inform her that the gesture was less indicative of grief than an attempt to bring her errant daughter-in-law to a sense of her own guilt. Julia lifted her chin, refusing to be intimidated.

  “What you will or will not have, George, has very little to say to the matter. And since Frederick is dead, his thoughts on the subject, if indeed he has any at all, need not concern me.”

  George turned quite purple in the face. “For God’s sake, Julia, take a good look at yourself, and then look about you!” The sweep of his arm encompassed everything from the coronet on her head to the small, shabby room in which they sat. “You were once mistress of Fieldhurst Hall! Is this what you want?”

  “No.” Julia’s gaze shifted to the sleeping form of the man whose hand she still held. “This is what I want.”

  “By God, Julia, I’ll not—”

  “Sit down, George.”

  George’s wife never raised her voice, but when she spoke it had the effect of a gunshot.

  “I beg your pardon, Henrietta?” demanded George, his expression that of a man whose favorite spaniel had suddenly turned and bitten his hand.

  “It is not my pardon you should be begging, but Julia’s. It is obvious that she is very devoted to this young man and, well, one has only to consider his actions on her behalf over the last ten months to guess his feelings for her.”

  “But—but—” George sputtered. “A Fieldhurst and a Bow Street Runner, of all people? I should feel as if I were failing in my duty to poor Frederick if I did not make some attempt to bring his widow to a consciousness of her own folly!”

  “Julia was a good wife to your cousin while he was alive, George, but Frederick is dead. Neither he, nor you, nor any of the Fieldhursts have any further claim on her.” As George wavered, his wife delivered her home thrust, with the gentlest of smiles on her face. “Let her alone, my dear. Perhaps if we had been as strong as she when we were first wed, a great many people would have been spared a lot of unnecessary pain.”

  She meant, of course, that he should have been as strong, and everyone in the room knew it. For it was not Henrietta but George who had made a bigamous marriage and sired three illegitimate sons by a woman who had every reason to believe herself legally wed, while his true wife, married earlier and in secret, lived as a fallen woman with her own two sons—the legitimate Fieldhurst heir and his younger brother.

  “Very well,” muttered George, giving up the battle he realized he could not win. “But know this, Cousin Julia: I will never receive Mrs. John Pickett, and if I should chance to meet her in public, I shall refuse to acknowledge her!”

  “Oh, George!” exclaimed Julia. “Do you promise?”

  George merely glared at her, then swept from the room with the tattered remains of his dignity drawn tightly about him. The dowager trailed behind him, as did his wife, who turned back at the door to address Julia.

  “May I be the first to wish you very happy, my dear?”

  “Thank you. And—what you said in there—I am very much obliged to you, my lady.”

  She laughed at that. “Oh, please call me Henrietta. We should sound utterly ridiculous ‘my ladying’ one another.”

  “George assures me that will never be an issue,” Julia reminded her ruefully.

  “As to that, well, try not to mind George too much, my dear. He has never felt himself competent to succeed your husband, and he attempts to compensate for his inadequacy with bluster. Once one understands that, much can be forgiven him.”

  “You are very generous, my la—Henrietta,” Julia observed. “I wonder if his other wife would agree.”

  “I said ‘much’ not ‘all,’ ” the viscountess pointed out with a twinkle in her eye. “As far as your own marriage is concerned, George must of course do as he thinks best, but I confess I should very much like to meet your Mr. Pickett—to meet him socially, that is. I spoke to him once, very briefly, while he was investigating Lord Fieldhurst’s murder. While I think we had best not inflict poor George on your husband until he has had a little time to grow accustomed to the match, I hope you will bring Mr. Pickett to tea one day. George usually takes tea at his club on Monday and Wednesday. If you should care to call, you and your husband may both be certain of a welcome.”

  “Thank you—Henrietta,” Julia said again, wondering, not for the first time, what this lovely woman had ever seen in George. “I may well do that.”

  “Henrietta!” bellowed George from somewhere beyond the door.

  “I’m coming, dear,” called the viscountess, rolling her eyes at Julia in a droll expression before taking her leave.

  After they had gone, Julia closed the door, let out a long breath, and returned to Pickett’s room.

  “We did it!” she crowed, taking up her usual place on the edge of the bed and clasping his hand in both of hers. “Oh my dear, I wish you could have heard.”

  Her smile faded at his utter lack of response. She freed one of her hands so that she might stroke her fingers through his tangled curls. “I never could have done it without you, you know. I have allowed myself to be ruled by the Fieldhursts for seven years. Until I met you, it had never occurred to me that I might do otherwise. I don’t know how I came to be so—so spineless! I was not always so; I suppose Frederick must have worn me down. But those days are over, and it is all because of you.”

  Liberally dosed with laudanum, Pickett nevertheless heard his lady’s v
oice and opened his heavy eyes. Lady Fieldhurst sat on the edge of his bed, smiling radiantly and wearing—was that really a crown on her head? He squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again with an effort. Lady Fieldhurst was still there, and yes, she wore a jeweled crown on her head.

  His foggy brain could supply only one explanation. The annulment had been granted, and she had married one of the royals. Which one? The Prince of Wales was already married, as was the Duke of York; she’d pointed out his duchess in the royal box. How many royal dukes were there, anyway? He hoped she hadn’t married the Duke of Cumberland; she’d said she didn’t like dancing with the Duke of Cumberland. He’d danced with her himself, once, on a dark terrace in Scotland. And to think that they’d been married at the time, and hadn’t even known it. He wondered if she’d liked dancing with him better than dancing with the Duke of Cumberland. Still, there was something wrong—she ought to be somewhere else, St. James’s Palace, maybe . . .

  “Shouldn’t be here,” he said, his voice slurred from laudanum. “Husband won’t like it.”

  “You are my husband, John,” she said, laughing as if the whole thing were a great joke. Which he supposed it must be to her, a thief-taker thinking that a viscountess would ever want to be his wife . . .

  “No,” he insisted. “Royal duke. Best go back . . . back to the palace.”

  The effort was too much. She was no longer his. She never really had been. She was married to someone else, so there was no reason not to surrender to the blackness that was always lurking in the corners of his consciousness, waiting to reclaim him. He gave in to the darkness. There was no reason not to, now.

  “ ‘Royal duke’?” echoed Julia in bewilderment, struggling to make sense of his fevered mutterings. It seemed strange to think that he still labored under the belief that their marriage would soon be annulled, when in her own imagination she had already borne him off to her residence in Curzon Street and installed him there as the master of the house. “I would love to know what thoughts are stirring in that usually clever brain of yours. Oh well, never mind. Just rest now, darling.”

  She leaned forward to drop a kiss onto his brow, and the jeweled coronet that she had all but forgotten escaped the pins that anchored it to her hair. It slid off her head and landed at a crazy angle on his. Enlightenment dawned.

  “Ah! I suppose that makes a certain sort of sense.” She straightened the coronet on his head, and sat upright to study the result. “John Pickett, Duke of Drury Lane. And your Duchess loves you very much.”

  CHAPTER 16

  A CONSUMMATION DEVOUTLY TO BE WISHED

  It was with some misgivings that Mr. Colquhoun left Lady Fieldhurst to the tender mercies of her late husband’s family. He hoped she would not allow them to browbeat her. It was true that at one time he’d had no very high opinion of her ladyship, when he’d believed her to be amusing herself at John Pickett’s expense by encouraging affections she had no intention of returning. Since then, however, he’d come to the realization that she was not at all the frivolous Society lady he’d once thought; in fact, he had been surprised to discover that she was a woman of hidden depths, and that her affection for his protégé was as sincere as his own. He only hoped her strength of character was sufficient to withstand the pressures brought to bear by the Fieldhurst cabal; he would hate to see the boy lose his lady this late in the game.

  Such were the magistrate’s reflections as he made his way to the Bow Street Public Office. Once there, however, he was obliged to set these thoughts aside and turn his attention to the more pressing issue of the missing diamonds. He took his usual place at the bench and summoned William Foote.

  “I have a job for you, Mr. Foote, and frankly, I don’t envy you the task,” he began. “It has come to my attention that our friend Vladimir Gregorovich Dombrowsky and his wife may have had reason to steal the diamonds themselves.”

  “The Russians?” Mr. Foote’s eyebrows drew together in a thoughtful frown. “But surely they haven’t been in England long enough. The first thefts took place just before Christmas, did they not?”

  The magistrate nodded. “Yes, and the Princess Olga and her entourage arrived in this country only six weeks ago, in mid-January. I don’t mean to suggest that they have been behind all the thefts. But they will certainly have heard of the others, and who knows what ideas the knowledge may have put into their heads? We have it on excellent authority, the Princess Olga herself, that the Dombrowskys are in need of funds. Perhaps they saw an opportunity to steal the Princess Olga’s diamonds, knowing that their crime would be mistaken for one of a string that began while they were still in Russia.”

  Mr. Foote shook his head. “I don’t know. It seems unlikely, if I may say so. To my mind, it’s more probable that all the thefts were committed by the same person.”

  “Aye, and you may be right, but the possibility bears looking into, nonetheless. You’ll have to question the fellow, and his wife, too. You’ll find them at Grillon’s Hotel in Albemarle Street. And try to use a little diplomacy, mind you! It won’t do to set his back up, and if you can contrive to accomplish the thing without letting him realize he’s under suspicion, so much the better.”

  “I’ll do my best,” promised Mr. Foote.

  Mr. Colquhoun gave a grunt of acknowledgment. He didn’t doubt Foote’s sincerity, but he did have his reservations as to just how good Mr. Foote’s best would be. Although the man was efficient enough at his work, and there was no denying the fact that he’d enjoyed a prodigious run of luck in recovering most of the other stolen jewels, Mr. Foote was not particularly well liked among the Bow Street force, and Mr. Colquhoun found it unlikely that the upper classes would take to him any more readily than the middling ones had done.

  No, his choice for the task, had that young man been available, would have been John Pickett. Not that he would have wished the temperamental Russian on the boy, precisely, but Pickett had a gift for mimicry that allowed him to imitate the speech of his betters without even being aware that he was doing so. Then, too, there was his association with Lady Fieldhurst; not the least benefit of that unusual pairing was the fact that the lad had become at least somewhat accustomed to rubbing elbows with the aristocracy. It occurred to Mr. Colquhoun that their marriage, though not without its own unique challenges, might well prove to be the making of both parties—provided, of course, that her ladyship had the gumption to stick to her guns against her late husband’s family.

  Well, he would certainly be curious to know how that interview had come out, but he doubted he would have an opportunity to find out before morning; having given Mr. Foote his orders, he felt himself duty bound to be present in Bow Street to hear the results of the senior Runner’s inquiries.

  “While you are about it, Mr. Foote,” he added, “I shall also expect you to comb the pawnshops, just in case Dombrowsky—if in fact he is the thief—should attempt to convert the diamonds to ready money before returning to Russia, where the jewels would be much more likely to be recognized.”

  “Begging your pardon, sir, but I’ve already begun to do so.”

  “Good man! I’m sure I need not tell you that, should they turn up, you are to try and find out anything you can about who brought them in.”

  “Of course,” said Foote, scrawling in his notebook. “Mind you, I’ve tried to do so with all the other jewels, but with no success. Up to this point, our thief—or thieves, whichever the case may be—has hidden his tracks well.”

  “Ah well, he may slip up yet,” said Mr. Colquhoun with a sigh. “Then we’ll have him. In the meantime, learn what you can, and keep me informed of your findings.”

  Mr. Foote, correctly interpreting this as a dismissal, took his leave and set out on his assigned task.

  That night, having divested herself of her preponderance of jewelry as well as her cumbersome presentation gown (although this last was not accomplished without difficulty), Julia pulled her pink wrapper on over her petticoat and stays, then settled down once mo
re with The Vicar of Wakefield.

  “ ‘Chapter Four’,” she read aloud, “ ‘a proof that even the humblest fortune may grant happiness, which depends not on circumstances, but on—’ ”

  “My lady?”

  “Yes, John?” At the sound of his voice, she laid the book aside and moved to sit on the edge of the bed. “How do you feel?” She laid her hand on his forehead, and while it was still far from cool, she thought it not quite so warm as it had been.

  “My lady, tell me the truth.” His eyes were bright with fever, but his gaze was sharper, more focused than it had been a few hours earlier, when he’d been babbling about royal dukes. “Am I going to die?”

  “Why, no, my darling, of course you’re not going to die!” she insisted with a vehemence quite unsuited to the sickroom. “You’re getting better every day.”

  His brow puckered in bewilderment. “What—what did you say?”

  “I said you’re not going to die.”

  “No—something else. What did you call me?”

  The moment of reckoning, it seemed, was at hand. “I called you my darling,” she said, blushing a little.

  “Thought so.” He let out a sigh, and his eyes fluttered closed. “Dreaming again.”

  “No, you are not dreaming,” she insisted. “I do love you, John. I didn’t know how much, until I thought—”

  “Not dreaming,” muttered Pickett, turning away. “Delirious.”

  The time for talking was past. She cupped his face in her hands and, very gently lest she aggravate his injury, turned his head toward her and kissed him slowly and thoroughly on his parched lips.

  “Are there any more questions, Mr. Pickett?” she asked when at last she broke the kiss.

  He blinked in confusion. “You—you love me?”

  She nodded. “Very, very much.”

  “Thank you—thank you for telling me,” he said. “It’s enough, just knowing. At least—at least it wasn’t just me.”