A Scandalous Deception

by Lynn Messina

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  About the Author

  Beatrice Hyde-Clare Mysteries

  Love Takes Root series

  A SCANDALOUS

  DECEPTION

  LYNN MESSINA

  potatoworks press

  greenwich village

  COPYRIGHT © 2018 BY LYNN MESSINA

  COVER DESIGN BY JENNIFER LEWIS

  ISBN: 978-1-942218-23-4

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All Rights Reserved

  Published 2018 by Potatoworks Press

  Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or my any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without prior written permission of the copyright owner and publisher of this book.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  To Dawn Yanek—poor, poor Dawn, who said she would read one book and give me feedback, and now, here we are, seven books later. You are heroic.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Beatrice Hyde-Clare owed her change in status in her uncle’s household to a singular fiction invented to coax confidences out of an Incomparable during a weeklong house party at a country estate in the Lake District. Hoping to discover information about the young lady’s blighted love affair with a gentleman of inferior social standing, she’d created for herself a blighted love affair with a gentleman of inferior social standing. She gave him a name, a vocation, a steadfastly disapproving father, and a scar that ran all the way from his right temple to his left nostril.

  Her family, shocked to discover that the veteran of six unsuccessful seasons had not only a history but a torrid one at that, began to plot her return to the Marriage Mart. Their expectations were still low, of course, but if they anticipated a poorer quality of shopper, perhaps this time they might achieve their goal of finding a buyer.

  Amused by their attitude, Bea would not have minded their renewed focus on her future if they had been content to leave her torrid past in the past. Alas, her aunt was determined to bring it into the present—something she felt confident she could achieve, for a scar that cut across a man’s entire visage was a noteworthy feature.

  “Naturally, I can sympathize with the challenge of locating one clerk among the droves who work in the Chancery courts and Lincoln’s Inn and the Old Bailey,” Aunt Vera said with gracious concession. “But how many of these men can have angry marks on their faces?” She turned to her niece with her brows pulled tightly together, as if trying to read a sentence that was written in very small print. “You say it runs across his eye in a slash?”

  Bea smothered a sigh, for she had answered this question at least a dozen times since they had come to London the week before. Their return to the capital in anticipation of the new season marked the beginning of the hunt for Mr. Davies, a development she had not anticipated, for why would her family be interested in an erstwhile beau of hers. The inability to conceive of their fascination was a failure of imagination on her part, she realized now—although, to be fair, she had never meant for them to hear the story. She’d invented it solely for the benefit of Miss Otley, who, she now knew, was incapable of keeping a secret. “Yes, from his right temple to his left nostril.”

  “So it is several inches long,” Aunt Vera said, looking around the table as if seeking confirmation from everyone present that a line that connected those two points on a face would be of the proposed length.

  “I’m not sure I would say several,” Bea hedged cautiously, for she had no idea the precise number of inches encompassed by that terrain. During her conversation with Miss Otley in the Lake District, she had been pulling physical characteristics out of thin air, not measuring them with a ruler. “Perhaps a few.”

  Her aunt accepted the qualification with equanimity. “Very well. How many clerks among the droves who work in the Chancery courts and Lincoln’s Inn and the Old Bailey can have a scar on their face that is a few inches long? There may be five or six, certainly, but the number cannot reach as high as the double digits.”

  Bea wondered what her aunt thought a law clerk did to believe so many in the profession would have acquired such an extravagant disfigurement.

  “But surely his name is all the information we need to locate him,” Flora said, her hazel eyes opened wide with confusion.

  At this practical observation, her brother, Russell, who shared his hazel-eyed sister’s handsome looks, with auburn hair pleasantly disheveled à la Brutus, nodded at once and observed that “Theodore Davies” had a distinctive ring to it. Clearly, their father must be doing something wrong to have not discovered his whereabouts by now.

  Bea found his agreement to be a particularly alarming development, for her cousins generally liked to bicker about everything, regardless of how apparent the facts, and if they’d reached consensus on a point so glaringly obvious neither one could poke a hole in the other’s argument, then clearly the truth must be known to all of them.

  Her shoulders tense with dread, Bea waited for Uncle Horace to raise up to his full height of five feet ten inches, narrow his heavy-lidded eyes and declare Mr. Theodore Davies to be a phantasm of his depraved niece’s imagination.

  It was cowardly, she knew, but she tilted her head down and stared at her plate of kippers rather than confront the contempt that was sure to be gleaming in her uncle’s eyes.

  And yet no startling revelation was forthcoming. Instead, Uncle Horace sighed with frustration, assured his son he was doing the best he could and promised his family he would continue to make inquiries.

  It was, for all who sat at the breakfast table, a dispiriting way to start the day, but most particularly for Aunt Vera, who could not help but feel this mysterious gentleman, unknown to them prior to their September stay in the Lake District four months before, was the key to her niece’s happiness.

  By “happiness,” of course, she meant her betrothal, marriage and removal from the Hyde-Clare household, a position the girl had assumed at the age of five, when her parents drowned in a tragic boating accident.

  Although her aunt’s eagerness to see her gone was hardly flattering, Bea could not take offense, for she knew how much her presence vexed her aunt. Newly married and three months away from setting up her own nursery, Vera Hyde-Clare, née Harkness, had not anticipated having to care for the child of her husband’s older brother, whom she had met just once and fleetingly at that. Unfamiliar with the details of her husband’s resentments, Vera knew only that they were longstanding and deep, which was more than enough for her to adopt them.

  Years ago, after that first inauspicious season, she had resigned herself to the inevitability of Bea’s enduring presence, for the girl wasn’t lively enough or interesting enough or pretty enough or wealthy eno
ugh or clever enough to attract a suitor.

  And now suddenly, as if out of nowhere, there was a countervailing narrative to the one she had told herself for almost a decade. Her niece had found love! Yes, she had found it with a meager law clerk well beneath her station whom they would never invite to share their table, but it was still an accomplishment of which nobody had believed her capable. The affair had ended on a desperately sad note for Bea, with the love of her life marrying another and settling into blissful domesticity in Cheapside with their children.

  Aunt Vera, however, refused to be daunted by the tragic ending, for if mutual love had blossomed once with a law clerk, it could blossom again with another.

  Although she personally could not comprehend what an eligible young man might find to admire in her niece, she knew the ways of the heart often defied logic. That Mr. Davies had succumbed to Bea’s paltry charms proved incontrovertibly that love was irrational. Now she was convinced that if she could simply locate and study the law clerk, she would be able to decipher the elements that had attracted him to Bea and made Bea attractive to him in return. All she needed to see her niece permanently settled in her own establishment was more information about the type of man who appealed to her.

  Obviously, this plan was ridiculous, and Bea could not believe that her uncle had fallen in line with it or that her cousins continued to support it. Whatever strange impulses moved the human heart, they certainly could not be distilled down to a few easily identifiable character traits to be effortlessly reproduced and molded into a reliable facsimile of the original. If Mr. Theodore Davies had been an actual flesh-and-blood man, not merely a devious calculation to elicit confidences from Miss Otley, then surely there would be something ineffably unique about him.

  Bea knew better than to try to explain these self-evident truths to her aunt, for if the heart could be implacable in its desires, it was positively compliant in its open-mindedness when compared with the woman who had raised her.

  To be fair, it wasn’t only Aunt Vera’s perception of Bea that had altered with the revelation of a secret beau; her cousins looked at her differently as well. Twenty-year-old Flora, who was days away from the start of her second season, thought it was remarkably dashing of her cousin to initiate a romance with a man wholly unknown to her. She found it difficult enough to create a meaningful connection with a gentleman with whom she had an acquaintance or two in common, so the prospect of Bea striking up a conversation with a handsome and intriguing stranger confounded her. In her wildest imaginings, she would never have thought her cousin had the pluck. She’d certainly never demonstrated it in the ballroom or the drawing room.

  Russell, likewise, had assumed Bea was too dull and plodding to ever engage in any behavior the ton would deem scandalous. That she had succeeding in pulling off an entire courtship behind his parents’ backs encouraged him to wonder what feats of stealthiness he himself might aspire to, and he repeatedly asked for instructions on how to evade his parents’ notice. Obtaining a membership to Gentleman Jackson’s Salon was explicitly forbidden for the twenty-two-year-old, but if Bea could manage an entire affair, then he should be able to contrive a training session or two.

  For years, Bea had sought a more intimate relationship with her cousins, for they were the closest she would ever come to siblings, but the tenor of their interest made her distinctly uncomfortable. As the older relative, she had hoped they would look to her for guidance and advice, not tips for how to tell convincing lies and get away with secretive deeds.

  By all accounts, her seemingly harmless little lie designed to inspire an honest confession had turned in a considerable problem, and Bea wasn’t quite sure how to handle it. Having earned her family’s respect, she was reluctant to lose it, and yet the circumstance was untenable. Uncle Horace could not keep sending out letters inquiring after a man with a three-inch scar on his face, and she could not maintain the pretense that he might eventually find him. Every day, the weight of her falsehood grew heavier and heavier.

  What made the situation particularly painful for her to bear was the fact that she had actually done something deserving of their respect during their visit to the Lake District. There, at Lakeview House, when not lying to Incomparables, she had pieced together the truth behind the mysterious death of Mr. Otley.

  Yes, it was true.

  One of the house guests at Lord and Lady Skeffington’s elegant house party had gotten his skull bashed in with a candlestick, and Bea had discovered the information necessary to identify the killer.

  It was, she thought, a striking achievement.

  Although her aunt was impressed by her niece’s deductive skills—and, it must be said, genuinely relieved she had come to no harm in her pursuit of the truth—she was more horrified by her astuteness and daring.

  No one had imagined under that placid exterior, so docile and eager to conform to the requirements of her family, was an agile mind that could quickly knit together disparate pieces of information. She had a well-documented curiosity about the world, to be sure, for her head was frequently buried in books about faraway lands and obscure historical figures, but the importation of knowledge did not mean the exportation of wisdom.

  When had Bea become so clever?

  No matter how many times Aunt Vera put that question to her family—her husband, her children, even her niece—nobody had a satisfying answer.

  What was especially distressing about her niece’s unexpected intelligence was how liberal she was in its demonstration. Any other Hyde-Clare in the presence of an esteemed personage such as the Duke of Kesgrave, who had been a fellow guest in the Lake District, would hold her tongue in appropriate awe, but not Bea. She addressed him directly and challenged him openly and even taunted him with teasing remarks that implied she considered herself his equal.

  The audacity was insupportable and no doubt unprecedented in all of his grace’s two and thirty years, and the only thing Aunt Vera could think of to explain the change in her niece’s behavior was exposure to the brutally slain corpse of Thomas Otley.

  How thoughtless of the spice trader to provoke his murderer into bashing him on the head in the library of the elegant Jacobean manor house, where any young lady with a sleep difficulty might discover his battered body oozing blood everywhere!

  If only Beatrice could have been persuaded to start reading The Vicar of Wakefield, which she had brought with her on the trip, rather than wandering the corridors at night, then she would never have begun investigating the death of Mr. Otley or interrogating fellow house guests or stealing into gentlemen’s rooms to inspect their belongings or provoking dukes.

  Aunt Vera was terrified of what her niece’s newly discovered brazenness might portend for the family’s success in the coming season. True, the girl had been her familiar quiet self in the intervening four months, filling the hours with her usual occupations of reading in the library and taking long walks in the countryside. But Bexhill Downs’ society was sedate and dull, with few luminaries and certainly no dukes, and there was nothing to provoke a newly emboldened spinster to express her unnatural opinions.

  Now that they had returned to London, however, they would be awash in opportunities, and it seemed inevitable that the chit would do something truly mortifying that would harm Flora’s chances of finding a husband or injure Horace’s standing at his club or deny them all vouchers for Almack’s.

  The Duke of Kesgrave, in particular, seemed to incite Bea’s impertinence, and although Vera had gratefully latched on to his promise to call on the family in London when it was originally proffered at the end of their stay in Cumbria, for a visit from such an esteemed personage would be a coup for the pleasantly self-effacing Hyde-Clares, she hoped now that he would withhold his influence. His affect on her niece was far too dangerous.

  It was little wonder, then, Bea thought with amusement, her aunt had been so grateful to learn of the existence of Mr. Davies and his ennobling scar, for he was a ray of hope just when the situat
ion seemed impossibly dark. If her niece liked serious-minded men of the law, then they would find her a serious-minded man of the law.

  In light of this discovery, Aunt Vera considered Bea’s unmarried state to be partly her own fault, for she had never made her low expectations for her niece clear. If only she had thought to explain to the girl when she was still fresh from the schoolroom that they knew her to be of a shy and retiring nature and would happily consider all comers, regardless of how unconventional their upbringing.

  The Hyde-Clares’ standards, though inviolate for their own children, were entirely open to negotiation for the plain-faced orphan in their midst.

  Alas, Aunt Vera had not spoken so candidly with Bea, and all she could do now was apologize for the oversight and pledge not to make the mistake again. She would find her niece a lowly law clerk before the season was halfway through.

  Or maybe even a quarter.

  As absurd as her aunt’s intentions were, Bea sympathized with her plight, for the change in her conduct unsettled her too. If she had spent her life conforming to her family’s requirements, it was only because she didn’t know she had a choice. When she’d arrived at her aunt and uncle’s London town house as a young girl, sad and lonely and petrified of what her new life would be like, she had found little comfort or softness in her relations. After a pair of frigid hugs, she was handed off to the butler, who put her in the care of the housekeeper, who kept her company until a governess could be found. At every stop along the way she was told to be good, she was told to be grateful, she was told to be quiet and respectful and biddable. She was told to cause no problems or she would be sent to live with a family in the village, who would consign her to the scullery for the rest of her days.

  Beatrice believed it, every word, and let the fear dictate almost every aspect of her behavior for the next twenty years until the moment she found herself standing in a crowded drawing room about the announce the name of a brutal killer.