The Missing Heir

by Ranstrom, Gail

  Color rose to her cheeks as she remembered how she had gloried in all of the things Adam had done to her last night. Where had he learned such delightfully wicked things? And where could she learn things that would please him?

  Her door opened without a knock and Mrs. Dewberry peeked in. “Oh, you’re up, Mrs. Forbush.” She disappeared for a second and then reappeared with a tray. “Late night?”

  Grace smiled and looked down at the amethyst pendant still around her neck. “Very late,” she said.

  “Aye. Everyone is late rising today. Miss Dianthe is still abed. She has a powerful snore for one so small.” Mrs. Dewberry chuckled and poured a cup of tea from the pot on the tray, then brought it to Grace at her dressing table. “Mr. Hawthorne’s gone, though. Left half an hour ago.”

  “Gone?” Grace had a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach.

  “Aye. Said he had an appointment with an old friend at noon, but if you ask me, I think he went to the doctor to have that boil lanced.”

  “Boil?” Grace frowned. She thought she could recall almost every inch of Adam’s body, and she hadn’t noticed a boil.

  “Aye, Mrs. Forbush, but he said that he’d be back in time to take you gambling unless you’d rather stay in. Said he had something to talk to you about, Mrs. Forbush, something serious.”

  Serious? Oh, dear. He regretted last night. He was embarrassed. Or, worse, he was no longer attracted to her. Men found excitement in the chase, but perhaps he hadn’t found the same excitement in the “catch.” Perhaps she’d been a dreadful disappointment. Perhaps her lack of experience had made her dull and uninteresting as a lover. Or perhaps, even worse, he suspected her deceit. But wouldn’t he have said something last night instead of continuing her initiation into those erotic arts?

  “Aye, but he left the house whistling. Said if he didn’t make it back for dinner, he’d meet you in the library later.”

  She breathed a sigh of relief. Well, she’d find out what was so important soon enough. She had her own errands to be about today.

  Adam silently climbed the stairs to the second floor at the White Bear Inn on Bassinghall Street, Freddie Carter fast on his heels.

  “Go easy, Hawthorne,” Carter whispered. “By all accounts the man is a shadow of himself. The drinking—”

  “Shut up,” Adam growled. He had a tight enough rein on his anger without adding Carter’s womanish cautions. He knew what he had to do. For Nokomis. For his pledge to his blood brother, Mishe-Mokwa.

  At the top of the stairs, Adam slipped the knife from his boot and continued down the hallway to room four. Pressing his ear to the door, he listened for any sign of occupation. He heard the clink of a glass and then the sound of a bottle falling to the wood floor.

  He eased the latch down and pushed the panel inward. Carter’s breath behind him caught in a ragged sigh. The Bow Street runner really was afraid Adam would murder Major George Taylor in cold blood. Well, maybe he would, but not until he had some answers.

  Taylor sat slumped over a small wooden table, his forehead resting on the rough planks. Either he hadn’t heard their entry, or he hadn’t cared.

  “George Taylor?” he asked, just to be certain he was not about to kill an innocent man.

  An incomprehensible mumble was the only answer. Adam went forward and jerked the man’s head back by his hair. “Taylor?” he asked again.

  “Umph,” the man replied, fighting to focus on Adam.

  Adam took that as an affirmative. “Looks like noon wasn’t soon enough,” he said to Carter as he let go of the man’s hair.

  He planted his knife blade in the center of the table with a solid thump and took Taylor’s glass out of his hand. “Sober up, Taylor. If I can’t get answers from you, I have no reason to keep you alive.”

  “Who…who are you?” Taylor asked.

  Adam leaned close to the man, just to be certain Taylor would recognize him. “My name is Adam Hawthorne. I met some of your friends in Canada. Of course, they’re all dead now. You’re the last, Taylor.”

  “Last,” Taylor repeated.

  “What a pathetic excuse for a Englishman,” he told Carter over his shoulder. He turned back to Major Taylor. “Think back, Taylor. The winter of 1816. Fort Garry. A Chippewa tribe in winter camp southeast of Winnipeg.”

  Taylor moaned and his head rolled forward. “Didn’t…know. Wasn’t supposed to…happen that way.”

  “Explain yourself, Taylor. What was supposed to happen?”

  “Wasn’t supposed to be…a bloodletting. Just…” The man’s head fell forward again. “Need a drink,” he muttered.

  Adam pulled the man’s head back and held the whiskey glass in front of him. “Want a drink? Then answer my questions.”

  “You’re…Hawthorne?”

  Adam nodded, a grim feeling of satisfaction sweeping through him at the fear in the man’s eyes.

  “Knew you’d come,” he said.

  “It wasn’t supposed to happen that way? Then how was it supposed to happen?”

  “Just…eliminate the tribe. And you.”

  “Me?” Adam had toyed with that idea over the past four years, but couldn’t come up with any motives. Who would want him dead—want it badly enough to slaughter an entire Native American tribe to accomplish it? Or was the tribe the target, and he was just a bonus?

  “But you weren’t there.” Taylor looked bewildered by that fact, as if he’d been betrayed.

  “Why?” he asked. “Why did you do it?”

  “So I could come home,” he slurred, his voice turning into a whine. “Jus’ wanted to get out of that godforsaken wilderness. Said I could come home if I followed orders.”

  Adam pulled his knife out of the table and pressed it to Taylor’s throat. “And for that you slaughtered an entire tribe? You skewered children?”

  “Christ,” Carter groaned, stepping back from the table as if giving Taylor over to Adam.

  “It…it got out of hand.” Taylor’s gaze was fixed on the whiskey glass. “Madness. Insanity.”

  “Aye. Do you remember a little girl in beaded buckskins? So high?” He held his hand up to a point midway between his waist and his shoulders. “She always carried a doll made from a corn husk.”

  Taylor began to cry. He shook his head against the blade that Adam held steadily to his throat and drew blood. Taylor reached for the whiskey glass and Adam pinned his sleeve to the table with the knife.

  “Not until you tell me who killed Nokomis. That was her name, you son of a bitch. The little girl who was disemboweled by an English sword.”

  Sobs racked Taylor, shaking his entire drunken frame. “Still…still see her,” he gasped between sobs. “She haunts…me.”

  Blind rage seized Adam. Without quite realizing what he was doing, he pulled the knife from Taylor’s sleeve and held it, tip first, to Taylor’s throat again. His hand shook with the effort to hold it steady and not kill the man on the spot. From the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of Freddie, blanched and drawn, but silent. Adam knew he could kill this man with impunity and the temptation was overwhelming.

  Slowly, he withdrew his hand and let Taylor slump forward on the table’s surface.

  Carter exhaled and took a step forward, clapping a hand over Adam’s shoulder in a sign of support.

  “The name,” Adam rasped. “I want the name of the man who gave that order.”

  Taylor mumbled incomprehensibly, his head lolling on his crossed arms.

  “Who gave the order, damn it?” he shouted.

  “Came down from London,” Taylor said, lifting his head and reaching out for the whiskey glass.

  Adam let him have it this time. He retrieved the bottle from the floor and uncorked it. Wiping the neck on his sleeve, he took a long pull, praying for the moment when it would hit bottom and dispel some of the poison eating at his vitals.

  Carter took a pull at the bottle next. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and shook his head. “Good God. I thought you were actually g
oing to do it, Hawthorne.”

  “I may yet,” he said darkly, taking the bottle back. Why had he stopped? He’d lived for this moment for four years, and suddenly he had a conscience? Or was it Grace? Had her belief in him made him a better man?

  All these years, and it had finally come down to this—a broken, pathetic man in a seedy room in London. A man who still hadn’t given the answers Adam needed. Taylor was a pawn. But a pawn who’d killed Nokomis and led the men who had killed the others. Was Nokomis’s ghost enough to punish Taylor? Was living with the memory of what he’d done a just recompense? The man was killing himself by inches. He didn’t need Adam to finish the job. He’d do it himself, soon enough.

  But not before Adam got that name. Taking a deep breath, he turned back to Major George Taylor and demanded, “London? Where in London? Whose seal?”

  “War…Office,” he slurred, and passed out cold.

  Still not the answer he wanted. A name, damn it, he wanted a name. But he wouldn’t get one from Taylor until the man sobered up.

  On their way back down the stairs, he turned to Freddie Carter. “Put a man on Taylor day and night. No whiskey, no alcohol at all. Get some food in him. Then find me when the delirium has passed and he can answer some questions.”

  “Good heavens, Mr. Renquist! It is already June. Miss Talbot’s wedding will be upon us in no time. The banns have been read twice, and will be again in another few days.”

  Francis Renquist shrugged and shook his head. “Be that as it may, Mrs. Forbush, I’m having the deuce of a time coming up with anything more than suspicions and accusations. ’Tis all a bunch of taradiddle and nothing solid, if you ask me.”

  Grace blinked and a creeping feeling of doom invaded her vitals. “You think Lord Geoffrey is innocent?”

  “Didn’t say that, Mrs. Forbush. I don’t know. But I’m thinking we may not be able to prove anything unless you catch him in the act. Red-handed, as it were.”

  Grace had already begun to suspect as much. After all, if someone knew how Morgan was cheating, they’d have come forward by now.

  She sighed and glanced around the bookshop. The aisles were becoming crowded, patrons browsing as busily in the stacks as she had pretended to be until Mr. Renquist arrived. At least she had found a dark corner where they could not easily be overheard.

  Her head buzzed with possibilities. She’d never thought Lord Geoffrey stupid or foolish, but she had not anticipated him being so clever. He had a certain sinister charm and, despite herself, she almost liked him. After all, he’d never been anything but courteous to her, though she’d seen flashes of his ruthlessness when dealing with others.

  Then how was she to proceed? “Mr. Renquist, do you have any ideas or suggestions for me to follow? I am nearly desperate to make an inch of progress. Aside from Lord Geoffrey hiring a runner to follow me, I can find nothing against him.”

  A tall, fair-haired fellow edged a little nearer, reading the book spines on the shelves for titles of interest. Conversation impossible for the moment, Mr. Renquist pulled a heavy tome from the shelf and began paging through it.

  Grace glanced down at the book in her hand, one she had selected at random when she’d entered the shop scarcely ten minutes ago. A Woman’s Guide to Marital Bliss. Written by a man, of course, as was most propaganda on marriage. Curious, she opened the book to a page near the middle. A small illustration depicted a man sitting in a comfortable chair beside the fire with what Grace assumed to be a smile but which actually looked more like a smirk. A woman, ostensibly his wife, stood over his shoulder holding a tray bearing a glass of wine.

  Was she to believe a woman found marital bliss through service to her husband? What utter nonsense! She was about to close the volume and replace it on the shelf when a single word caught her eye. Intimacies. She stopped and found the passage again and read. The author contended that a wife needed to do little beyond submit happily to her husband’s “marital prerogatives” to ensure a harmonious union. If she could learn to bear such intimacies with good grace, so much the better.

  Her heartbeat tripped as she recalled last night. She’d been married and had never learned to find any pleasure in the endless nights with Mr. Forbush. Yet she had managed to achieve something very close to contentment in the marriage. But in one brief encounter with Adam, she had found the most incredible pleasure with a man to whom she was not married. Had she managed such a relationship with Mr. Forbush, that would have been bliss, indeed.

  She flipped back to the table of contents and read the chapter headings. The first half of the book seemed innocuous enough, concentrating on topics such as having his supper ready when he wanted, keeping a clean house and deferring to his superior judgment, but the last few chapters promised enlightenment. She found such subjects as learning how to determine your husband’s disposition, discerning your husband’s particular pleasures, how to create a mood of openness and relaxation, how to prevent him from looking for “succor” elsewhere and how to prevent “consequences” of such unions. If these things were true of husbands, they would almost certainly apply to lovers, as well. She decided to purchase this little treasure trove of information. It could prove very interesting reading indeed.

  The intruder moved away and Mr. Renquist began speaking again, his voice low and furtive. “We can’t be sure it was Morgan who hired the runner, Mrs. Forbush. I’m still looking into that.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Renquist. And were you able to glean any information regarding Lord Geoffrey’s background?”

  “That was a bit easier. The man is fairly well known and he has made no attempt to cover his past.”

  Graced looked around again, assuring herself that they were private, and then nodded encouragement. “Is there anything he would wish to cover?”

  Mr. Renquist shrugged. “You decide, Mrs. Forbush. He comes from a good family, comfortable, but not well off. The father was a baron from Yorkshire. He had only one sister. After school, he was commissioned in the Royal Navy, and from there he was transferred to some obscure government branch for service abroad. Still looking into that. But whilst he was in the navy, his mother died and his sister was wed off to an older gentleman of wealth but questionable reputation. She died of a fall two years later.”

  Renquist took a deep breath and shook his head. “It gets a little foggy from here on out. It was just before that when Lady Annica was involved in investigating the white slavery traffic and Miss Bennington was killed. Morgan disappeared after that. No one knows where he was or what he was doing. Rumors range from mending his broken heart to being on a secret mission for the crown. All we know for certain is that by the time he returned, his father had come to London on business and got caught up in the social whirl. Fell in with a fast crowd and found hells. They were all deep players, I understand. The elder Morgan depleted the family fortune to satisfy his gaming debts, then sold the mother’s jewelry—”

  “Heavens. But they must have had property?”

  “Aye. But he lost that, too, and swore he was cheated. Challenged some young buck from Hampshire to a duel. Pistols at dawn, y’know. Morgan’s father was killed.”

  How tragic, Grace thought. Lord Geoffrey had lost his entire family. But if he held gambling responsible, why did he now engage in it as an occupation? “Was Lord Geoffrey seeking revenge when he took up gambling?”

  “That is what everyone thought at first. Now they say it’s a family weakness. The difference is that Lord Geoffrey is skilled. If rumor is true, he’s made a fabulous fortune at it.”

  He doesn’t need the money, Grace thought, but he’d be anxious to hold on to it after his father’s misfortune. So then the excitement was what brought him back to the tables night after night. And he must resort to cheating only if the stakes were high enough to put his fortune at risk.

  “And what do the gossipmongers say about his cheating?”

  “Most say yes, but it could be just devilish good luck.”

  Ah, but Grace had learned
that gossip often had a core of truth. She glanced down at the book in her hand. The answer to her next question would determine her course. “Did you find any reason why a man like Lord Geoffrey Morgan would have to win a bride in a game of cards rather than court and woo one?”

  “No speculation on that, Mrs. Forbush. He’s had a mistress or two, but tired of them quickly. Recently he’s only been seen with courtesans and the demimonde. I doubt many of the men whose money he takes would be willing to ask him home to dinner to meet their daughters. And I likewise doubt he has many invitations to balls and the like.”

  No reassurances there. She would have to continue her investigation. She thanked Mr. Renquist, arranged to meet with him at Marie’s shop on Monday, and went to the counter to pay for her purchase.

  The clerk looked down at her choice and raised his eyebrows. “Very forward-thinking of you, madam. Our usual purchaser is male.”

  She laughed, glad she was wearing gloves to hide the absence of a wedding ring. “I think it is always useful to know what our men are thinking that we should do to make them happy.”

  The clerk chortled, gave her the change, and wrapped her purchase in brown paper.

  She stepped out onto the street and opened her parasol, her little book tucked under her arm. She would be home in time to take a long, leisurely bath before going out this evening and she would look into some more of the chapters then.

  Mr. Dewberry, sitting in the box of her coach across the street, waved at her and hopped down to hold the door for her. Traffic was light and she stepped off the curb to cross the street.

  From the corner of her eye, she noted a coach pulling away from its position a few yards down the street. She was halfway across the broad street when the driver cracked his whip over the horse’s head and the coach picked up speed. He was going too fast to stop and he was headed straight for her!