A Scandalous Deception

by Lynn Messina

  As the tenor of that delight was clear even to Bea, she understood the duke’s response and her ladyship’s intention in eliciting it. What escaped her comprehension, however, was why the other woman had implied earlier that the information would soon be widely known. “You said yet before.”

  Her ladyship, her eyes challenging Kesgrave to disapprove of her daring to tryst with a significantly younger man, spared only the briefest glance at Beatrice. “Excuse me?”

  “Before, when I asked to whom you had given the dagger, you said the information was not public yet,” she explained. “Why did you say yet? Are you and Lord Duncan preparing an announcement? Is there a future to your relationship that requires its broadcast to the world at large?”

  Lady Abercrombie narrowed her eyes but otherwise affected amusement at the question. “Aren’t you a charming young lady, determined to find a cabal in a thoughtlessly tossed-off word.”

  Bea sat up straighter in her chair, for when she’d asked the question her reach had truly not extended so far as a secret plot. She’d merely thought the inclusion of the word yet was odd. Now, however, she wondered what her ladyship was hiding. “Obviously, there’s nothing to be gained in revealing to all and sundry your liaison with Lord Duncan, as it will alienate your son and make the ton more keenly aware of your age creeping ever upward. If you planned to marry him, it would be different, for then it would be a triumph for you. But Lord Duncan hasn’t reached his majority and his parents would never allow their heir to marry a woman beyond childbearing years. So I ask again: Why did you say yet?”

  Her ladyship sent the duke a resentful look, as if he were responsible for this act of effrontery disrupting the tranquility of her Chinese-style sanctuary, with its beautiful lotus chandeliers and playful carved serpents. “Honestly, my dear, I don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish with this juvenile display. Tantrums might work in the schoolroom but they have no effect here. Now, you might wish to linger longer to make preposterous insinuations, but Kesgrave, at least, has the mature judgment to recognize when it is time to leave.”

  She rose to her feet, and the duke, impelled by courtesy, stood as well, but Bea stayed firmly planted in her seat. She was determined to get a reply to her question, yes, but she was also cradling a sleeping lion in her lap. She assumed all maxims advising one not to disturb the slumber of dogs applied double for the slumber of lions.

  Thoughtfully, Bea said, “As you have no cause for the story to get out, your word choice must imply that someone else will be spreading the news. Could it be Lord Duncan?” She paused a moment to consider the prospect. “He would have some motive, for a tryst with an older, more experienced woman would burnish his reputation among his fellows, I’m sure. But is that worth the alienation of his friend? I don’t know the gentleman well enough to speculate, but let’s say for now that Lord Duncan has chosen to honor your request to remain silent about the affair. That means that some other party knows about it and plans to publish the information.” As soon as she said the word publish, the missing piece of the puzzle slipped into place and she understood why she had said yet. “The Earl of Fazeley discovered your relationship and planned to include details of it in his memoir.”

  Lady Abercrombie laughed gaily and complimented Beatrice on her remarkable imagination. “You are indeed a delightful child. We must do all we can to make you fashionable. It will be my project for the season. First, we shall introduce you to Lady Jersey and secure your vouchers for Almack’s. Then we’ll go shopping, for surely we can improve on that serviceable but dull gown you’re wearing. Who is in charge of your care? Your aunt and uncle, did you say? Vera Hyde-Clare never did have an eye for color or style. No bother. We shall take care of it, I promise.”

  Having spent her whole life pretending to be one thing or another, her ladyship affected sublime indifference beautifully, but Bea wasn’t fooled. She understood the deal on offer: If she would leave off talking about Lord Duncan and the affair, then Lady Abercrombie would provide her with the social success all young ladies dreamed of. It made sense, of course, that that would be her quid pro quo, as popularity was clearly the thing the other woman valued most.

  Before Bea could assure her she was content with her obscurity and adequate wardrobe, Kesgrave said, “Fazeley was Duncan’s godfather.”

  Lady Abercrombie sighed and sat down. “Well, if you’re determined to deprive me of the dignity of my lie, then, yes, Duncan told Fazeley about our dalliance and Fazeley came to me threatening to publish it in his memoir if I didn’t give him a substantial sum to forget about it. Naturally, I’m too stubborn to succumb to coercion and told him to do whatever he thought was best. It’s a scandal, of course. George will rail at me for the betrayal, as he’s very much like his father in many ways, and his sisters will lament the embarrassment, but at the end of the day it will be a tempest in a teacup. Indeed, I fully expect George to thank me when he calms down, for if one’s friends are so debauched as to dally with one’s mother, it’s better to know before they have the opportunity to dally with one’s wife.”

  Her tone was convincingly light and resigned to the prospect of exposure, and Bea wondered if it was an effect she was only able to achieve now that the threat had passed. Fazeley’s death had solved an awkward problem for her, which provided her with an inducement to seek it. But would any woman be so rash as to end a man’s life simply to avoid an uncomfortable scene with her son? Bea thought rather not, but, she reminded herself, she had only Lady Abercrombie’s word as to the nature of the secret the earl held. Perhaps in truth it was something considerably more scandalous.

  There was no way to know without having access to the book.

  Thinking of the book, she looked at the duke to gauge his reaction to the news that Lord Fazeley’s memoir was not only genuine but also the chronicle of salacious deeds the gossipmongers feared it would be. His expression, however, gave nothing away, and when he did speak, it was only to observe that Lord Duncan should have known better than to confide in his godfather.

  “He’s just a boy,” her ladyship said, excusing his naïveté. Then she turned to Bea, her expression a mix of exasperation and impatience. “Really, my dear, it’s a rather ordinary dagger. A little flashier than usual but still fairly mundane. I’m not sure it’s worth all this bother. Indeed, no dagger is. I’ve half a mind to donate my entire collection of knives to the British Museum, for they either gather dust in a glass case or cause me to be subjected to an unjust interrogation in my own drawing room.”

  “If you’re going to donate anything to the museum, perhaps it should be your drawing room,” Bea said in an attempt to be a little cutting but it somehow came out fully admiring.

  “La, it’s perfection, is it not?” Lady Abercrombie asked with almost childlike delight as she tilted her head back to gaze in wonder at her own coved ceiling. “Getting all the details right was simply the most challenging experience of my entire life. The bamboo canopy over the side table is the third one. I had to send the first two back because the stalks didn’t match. Imagine sending irregularly sized bamboo stalks to Mayfair!”

  Bea professed horror and assured her she could not.

  “It took the workmen five tries to get the chandelier in the center of the room. You’d think they’d appreciate achieving perfection, but they resented the obligation every step of the way,” she explained with a shake of her head. “And do not let me start talking about the wallpaper, for how an artisan can advertise himself as an expert on the Oriental design and not know what a pagoda looks like is one of the great scandals of the modern era.”

  But of course it was already too late, for having begged her visitor not to get her started on the wallpaper she had already gotten herself started on the wallpaper and could not finish until the whole terrible truth was out.

  Despite herself, Bea found herself fascinated by the widow’s devotion to a vision and her determination to see it carried out to the last minor detail. She felt the triviali
ty of the undertaking, the emphasis on appearance and spectacle that accompanied everything the other woman did, but she also perceived the consequentiality of it. It required an astute mind to stay abreast of the hundreds of particulars that went into such an elaborate presentation.

  She had little doubt this woman could conceive and execute a plan to carry out a murder with military-like precision. Maybe she did it herself. Maybe she recruited an underling. Maybe she hired an associate.

  Finding the discussion of the room’s interior design to be not as restful as tales of salaciousness and extortion, the lion cub raised his head, roared softly and climbed down from Bea’s lap. Kesgrave was likewise disquieted by the new subject and interrupted their conversation on the proper composition of a dragon’s scale to announce their departure. The hour grew late, and he had to return Miss Hyde-Clare to her home before her uncle began to wonder where she was. “We don’t want to ruin the surprise.”

  Lady Abercrombie promptly agreed, for she was particularly fond of surprises, and wished Bea luck in her dealings with Lord Duncan. “I cannot believe he will deny you the pleasure, especially if you offer him a generous price. His parents hold the purse strings unduly tight.”

  Bea thanked her for the word of advice and bid her good day as she stepped into the hallway, where her maid waited with her pelisse. She expected to depart immediately, but Lady Abercrombie could not be made to take a brusque leave of Kesgrave. As effortlessly as she’d assumed the role of decorator when discussing the drawing room, she adopted the part of accomplished flirt in making her goodbyes, teasing and cajoling her guest on his indecent haste. Now, as he had before, the duke quickly fell in line, uttering foolish phrases and extravagant praise, and Bea kept her head tilted down so he would not read the disdain in her eyes.

  By the time they stepped outside again, she was feeling churlish and impatient with Kesgrave for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was she knew how he would respond if she raised her suspicions about Lady Abercrombie.

  “Tilly?” he would say in that tone of baffled fondness. “Tilly the delightful scatterbrain?”

  Kesgrave thought far too little of the widow to take her seriously, something her ladyship had been relying on for years.

  Once again Bea thought about the monumental undertaking of the drawing room and knew the woman was far more substantial than he gave her credit for.

  Wishing for the opportunity to tweak his ego in private, she suggested they walk the half dozen blocks to Portman Square. As Annie trailed several steps behind them, she said, “I’m surprised you didn’t explain that it was char or perhaps trout.”

  The duke tilted his head, looked at her with baffled blue eyes and said, “Excuse me?”

  “When Lady Abercrombie and I were discussing which fish the scales on a dragon most closely resemble, I’m surprised you didn’t volunteer an informed opinion, such as suggesting that it was probably char or trout,” she said, referencing a conversation they’d had months ago at Lakeview Hall. Naturally, she had no expectation of his remembering it. “That sort of attention to detail is one of your chief delights.”

  “Char and trout are fish indigenous to the Lake District and cannot be found in China, which is where most depictions of the dragon derive. Presumably, artists rendering them employ local species such as silver carp,” he explained, his voice steeped in pomposity and his bearing regal as he corrected the profound ignorance of her comment.

  And then he relaxed his shoulders and grinned, revealing the truth of his intentions, and she felt a confounding twist in her belly. While surrounded by the ostentation of Lady Abercrombie’s drawing room—a condition that applied as much to the duke’s manners as to the gilded serpents—she had been unable to imagine ever feeling comfortable in his presence again. Once she had seen that aspect of his character, that intimidating society creature plying flattery like wine, she’d believed she would always see it. But that assumption was wrong, for here was her Kesgrave again.

  Oh, that was dangerous—to think of him as hers.

  She closed her eyes, inhaled deeply and revised her thought: Here was the familiar Kesgrave.

  When she opened them again, she said, “Lord Duncan is a likely prospect. He must have been quite angry when he discovered his own godfather had betrayed his trust. It was exceptionally contemptible that Fazeley used someone else’s secret to extort money.”

  “On the contrary,” the duke said, “it’s quite unexceptional. I’m fairly certain that’s how blackmail works. One discovers another person’s immoral or embarrassing deeds and threatens to expose them to the world, as there’s no money to be made in threatening to expose one’s own sins.”

  “I stand corrected, your grace,” she said with a nod of her head. “I wonder how many other victims there are. The fact that he threatened Lady Abercrombie with exposure in his book indicates to me that he made a regular habit of coercing money out of fellow members of the ton. There could be dozens of people who wanted to harm him. A truly successful blackmail scheme would entail multiple payments from a variety of targets. Perhaps someone became tired of paying the fee or simply didn’t have pockets deep enough to cover it any longer. If only we had the book, then we would know the scale of the problem.”

  “But we don’t have the book,” he said calmly, “nor will we try to get it.”

  It was an astonishing implication, to insinuate that she would gain illegal entry into a dead man’s town house, and Bea halted in her steps to stare at him, determined to understand how this remarkable thing had happened. Of all the people in all the world to credit Beatrice Hyde-Clare with unmitigated courage and daring, how had it turned out to be the high-handed Duke of Kesgrave?

  Almost at once, she began to wonder if she could actually be the woman he perceived her to be. How did one go about breaking into a gentleman’s residence? The first step would be to acquire the skill of opening a lock with an instrument created for just such a purpose. Where did one go to learn something like that? Were there schools or tutors available for hire?

  Displeased with her silence, he repeated the injunction. “I said, nor will we try to get it.”

  “Yes, yes, I know,” she insisted, her eyes darting to the street, where a high phaeton helmed by a stern-faced driver rumbled past. “I don’t know why you would think otherwise.”

  That statement, at least, was true enough.

  “That’s because you cannot see the shifty look in your eye and I can,” he explained with only a hint of amusement.

  “Shifty,” she repeated softly, flattered by this unexpected description as well.

  Surely, a shifty woman could figure out how to sneak into Lord Fazeley’s home without anyone being the wiser.

  “And there it is again,” he said, sounding a note of satisfaction, as if he’d just caught her in the act of stealing a biscuit from the tea tray. “I must insist, Miss Hyde-Clare, that you tell me exactly what you are thinking.”

  “That we must arrange an interview with Lord Duncan,” she said honestly, as she started walking again. The detour to Lady Abercrombie’s home was more time-consuming than she’d expected, and the hour grew late. “There is much we do not know, such as how he felt upon discovering his godfather’s betrayal and what he did with the knife. If he doesn’t have a satisfying answer to the latter, then we may be sure he is the murderer.”

  “Yes, we do need to find out what he knows,” Kesgrave agreed pensively, as an abstracted expression swept across his face.

  “Ah, now I see,” Bea said.

  His eyes came into focus as he considered her. “See what?”

  “How shifty looks,” she replied. “You intend to interview Lord Duncan on your own. And you will use your advantage as a male in society to do it. Please do not insult me by denying it.”

  His smiled faintly. “That I’m a male in society? Rest assured, my dear Miss Hyde-Clare, I will never try to deny to you that I am a man.”

  She growled at his playful tone,
which served not only as a distraction but also as an uncomfortable reminder of his flirtation with Lady Abercrombie.

  Although her reaction only amused him further, he addressed her concern seriously. “I thought only of moving the investigative process along more quickly by raising the matter with him this evening if I could find him at his club or a particular gaming hell that he is known to frequent. If that is what you meant by taking advantage of my position in society, then I must concede you are correct.”

  It infuriated her to think of all the options that were available to him but not to her, and rendered impotent by the implacable forces that constrained her choices, she lashed out at the duke in the harshest terms she could think of. “I must admit, your grace, you do indeed know how to take advantage of your position in society, which, after today’s display, I can only assume is as a charming lapdog. I would never have thought you could manage feats of excessive subservience because at the Skeffingtons’ you wore such a supercilious sneer, but I see now you just needed the right hand to pet you. And what a lovely hand it was. How did you describe her skin? Like the finest Limoges. How sweetly you fell in line with her expectations, how eagerly you debased yourself to please her. You are clearly a skilled sycophant. If only I had realized it sooner, then I wouldn’t have been so in awe of you.”

  ’Twas a thoroughly punishing speech, and she delighted to see the Duke of Kesgrave cringe multiple times. But he did not blush and he did not offer the self-justifying defense she’d expected.

  Rather, he said softly, “You were in awe of me?”

  Startled, she blinked at him several times, wondering how the conversation had gotten so far off course. Only moments ago, she had been tossing humiliating insults at his head. “What? No. Of course not.”

  “But you just said it,” he replied.

  Bea could not believe that was true and repeated the speech quickly in her head: lapdog…Limoges…eagerly…