A Scandalous Deception

by Lynn Messina

  “Cor blimey, miss,” Jenkins said when he saw her condition, revealing that he had never believed the fiction of Mr. Wright. “Uh…I mean, sir. Or…um, mister. Whose fist did ye run into?”

  As the groom helped her to her feet, she said, “I believe the fist ran into me.”

  Jenkins shook his head. “You gonna have a pair of shiners as bad as Fits McKinney’s in ’08.”

  “Fits McKinney?” Bea said to Kesgrave, flinching when her attempt to raise an eyebrow resulted in an angry throb.

  “Prizefighter,” he explained as he opened the door to the carriage. “Won a few matches but got knocked out in a brutal bout against Belcher. It was a devastating blow for Jenkins, who had laid a large bet on him.”

  The groom sighed heavily, shook his head and proclaimed that he’d lost a small fortune.

  Bea promptly expressed her sympathy, which caused the duke to tut disapprovingly because, as he explained, the lesson had been a salutary one, for every man must learn to wager only what he could afford to lose.

  “Right ye are, Duke,” Jenkins said. “Right ye are.”

  Once they were settled in the coach, Kesgrave asked her to describe her attacker, a task that proved impossible for her. The only positive piece of information she could provide was that he was a man, and even that certainty fell apart when he asked her how she knew.

  “It happened so quickly,” she said. “He came at me from the side, tossing me to the ground before I even realized he’d punched me in the face. And then he was on top of me, hands around my throat, warning me to stay away, before running off. I can’t imagine the whole thing took more than half a minute.”

  “He had his hands around your throat?” Kesgrave asked quietly.

  “Only briefly,” she said, “and only to underscore his point that I should stay away. But stay away from what? He did not say. It’s a reference to the Fazeley matter, of course, but then why didn’t he take the manuscript? Surely, that’s the source of any animus anyone felt toward the earl.”

  Bea looked at Kesgrave—still a blurry figure across from her on the other seat but more in focus now that she was accustomed to the limits of her vision—to see if he had any suggestions. Instead of offering any useful ideas, he said, “He threatened to kill you.”

  Somehow he said the words in a way that was more dire than the incident itself. “Well, yes, technically he did. But I don’t think it was so much a threat of death as a warning to preempt the need for more extreme action. As an attempt to do that, however, it misses its mark, for I don’t know what I’m supposed to stay away from. It would have served the villain’s purpose better to be less enigmatic.”

  The duke shook his head at her staunchly nonchalant reply and said peevishly, “I do wish you would show a little more concern about the welfare of your person.”

  Although she knew what he was referring to, she refused to let herself be drawn into a conversation about her safety. The only solution he could advise was her removing herself from the situation, and she was not willing to do that. “Rest assured, concern for my welfare occupies a very large part of my mind. Even now, as I try to figure out what my attacker meant by ‘stay away,’ I’m consumed with worry about how I will explain my appearance to Aunt Vera—the bruises as well as my cousin’s clothes—and what kind of punishment I will endure. If my family does not consign me to the maniac ward at Bedlam, they will send me to Welldale House, where you will never hear from me again. There, your grace, that neatly solves your other problem, for I will be safe from assault in the country. I almost suspect my attacker is working in concert with my family to permanently remove me from London.”

  Something of her distress must have communicated itself to him, for he surprised her by taking the matter of her banishment seriously. “We can at least arrange for a change of clothing to mitigate your offenses.”

  The proposal was so charmingly naïve in its understanding of society and the world, Bea grinned widely and didn’t even mind the pain. “Can you imagine my aunt’s horror if I were to suddenly appear in a dress she has never seen before? Truly, I can’t imagine what she would think, but it would not bode well for my future. Bedlam might be too optimistic.”

  “I cannot believe your thinking is anything but histrionic,” he announced.

  She looked at him sorrowfully. “If I do not comprehend what it means to be a duke, then you do not comprehend what it means to be an unmarried young lady. If I tell you appearing before my aunt in a brand-new dress is worse than appearing before her in men’s clothing, then pray do me the courtesy of believing it.”

  “Very well,” he said, brusquely. “Another approach. Perhaps a bribe? Jewelry has long been known to make unpleasant news more palatable. We could stop at the jeweler and pick up a trinket.”

  At the word trinket, Bea straightened in her seat and stared at the duke as Miss Cornyn’s necklace flashed in her mind. “Of course. Of course,” she said excitedly, leaning forward to see his face better as she revealed the truth. “It was a ruby. The necklace Miss Cornyn was wearing, did you not notice it? It was simple but stunning. Something about it seemed oddly familiar, and I just realized it’s because it matches the description given by the earl in his diary. Recall that according to his own account he conducted several affairs at once and always ended the relationship by bestowing on the discarded young lady a ruby necklace with a pear-shaped pendant.”

  “He seduced Miss Cornyn,” Kesgrave said, understanding perfectly.

  “Yes, and when he ended the affair he gave her the usual gift as consolation, which Mr. Hill recognized from the manuscript,” she said.

  “Mr. Hill?” he asked in surprise.

  “It had to be he. According to Mr. Cornyn, he’s a circumspect reader who notices details. I wager he read the memoir, recognized the necklace from the description and stabbed Lord Fazeley in the back as an act of revenge,” she said. “He’s clearly in love with Miss Cornyn. You saw how he reacted to me when he thought I was flirting with her.”

  “Stay away,” he murmured. “Hill was warning off the lecherous Mr. Wright.”

  She nodded. “Yes, yes. He’s a young man with a deep well of rage and little ability to control it. How galling it must have been for him to see the earl there in the office, refusing to return the small amount Mr. Cornyn had advanced him on expectation of a publishable manuscript. Fazeley had taken so much from them already. This additional insult was more than he could stand, and unable to contain his fury one moment longer, he followed the earl to the Strand and viciously stabbed him in public.”

  If Kesgrave was taken aback by her gruesome description, he did not reveal it. Rather, he found her reasoning convincing and agreed it was likely that events had unfolded exactly as she’d described.

  “Tell Jenkins to go back,” she said, suddenly agitated. “We must turn around at once.”

  “Turn around?” he said in wonder. “Now? But you need a cold compress for your bruises before they get worse, and you are in a tremendous amount of pain and in need of rest. We can come back tomorrow. Mr. Hill will still be there.”

  “In need of rest?” she scoffed, insulted by the suggestion that she would be so missish as to take to her bed when there was a murderer to be confronted. “I was punched in the face, your grace, not woken from a deep sleep in the middle of the night. Do not waste any more time. Inform Jenkins of our change in plans and let us return right away. Unless you think we should collect a Runner first. I will leave that for you to decide as you handled the matter during our last investigation.”

  Kesgrave wanted to argue. She didn’t have to see his face clearly to know he objected strongly to her plan, for it was apparent in the taut silence in the carriage and the stiff way he held himself. Ultimately, it was his choice to make, as her resources were constrained and she could certainly not hail a hack with her face swollen and purple.

  After a long moment—needlessly drawn out, as far as she was concerned—he finally nodded in assent and sai
d, “All right, I will inform Jenkins. But I want something from you in return.”

  Relieved, Bea nodded eagerly and slid forward in her seat. “Yes, of course. Anything.”

  “You must promise to cease investigating these horrible deaths that keep crossing your path,” he said seriously.

  She stared at him, unable to believe he would use such an underhanded method to achieve his goal. “I expected better of you, your grace, than to seek to curtail my freedom with unfair conditions.”

  “In the pursuit of two villains, you have found yourself twice brutalized,” he said curtly. “First, you were struck over the head with a wooden plank and locked in an abandoned shed, from which you had to escape by thrashing a hole in its wall, and second, you were assaulted on a city street in the middle of the day by a man who threatened to strangle you. If you persist in this folly, you will get yourself killed and that I cannot abide.”

  Kesgrave spoke coolly, dispassionately, like a tutor explaining an algebra equation to a student, and yet her heart fairly leaped from her chest when he announced he could not abide the thought of her death.

  You are a fool, she thought, annoyed that she could interpret for even a moment the most general display of concern for a fellow human being as a personal admission of tragedy and loss.

  Annoyed now with both of them, she considered his proposal carefully and wondered what cost it would actually exact from her. Stumbling across two dead bodies over the course of little more than four months was extraordinary enough. Did she really think it would happen a third time?

  No, of course not.

  Truly, if it did happen again, she would start to believe the problem had something to do with her and consign herself to the ward for lunatics at Bedlam.

  Ultimately, the promise he sought from her was empty.

  But as worthless as the promise was, it wasn’t entirely meaningless, for making it implied he had a right to restrict her movements when he in fact had no rights over her at all. Furthermore, it meant that if the highly implausible, almost impossible event did somehow happen for a third time, she would not be free to pursue it. She would be honor bound by a promise she had given under duress.

  Was one obliged to honor a promise one gave under duress?

  Yes, devil it, one was.

  But not, she realized, to those things that aren’t specifically mentioned in the promise itself. If she vowed to cease investigating deaths that crossed her path, it still left her free to investigate all those deaths she had to seek out herself.

  Did she plan on seeking out deaths to investigate? Of course not. But the option remained open to her, and that was what was important.

  “Very well,” she said, sighing with excessive heft to make sure he understood the weight of the concession. “I promise to cease investigating the horrible deaths that keep crossing my path. There, your grace, are you satisfied? May we now proceed to Sylvan Press so that we may hold Mr. Hill responsible for the brutal slaying of Lord Fazeley? Or do you have other promises you would like to extract through devious means?”

  “No others,” he said mildly. “Just the one to ensure you don’t meet a grisly end at the hands of a vicious killer.”

  “For the record, I find your high-minded condescension to be just as irritating as your usual sort,” she said.

  He professed surprise that she didn’t find it more irritating.

  She scowled at the taunt, a meager effort with her swelling, and resisted the urge to respond. Instead, she stared calmly out the window as he instructed the driver on their new destination. As they were returning to Catherine Street posthaste, she concluded he had decided against the necessity of a Runner. She imagined it was a reasonable decision, as it would be far easier to bring charges against a clerk at a publishing concern than a member of the peerage, and if the killer should decide to flee, the Duke of Kesgrave had the resources to find him and deliver him to justice.

  They arrived back at the offices of the Sylvan Press only forty-five minutes after they had departed, and much was the way they’d left it. Mr. Cornyn was standing at the counter by the front door, his head close in conference with Mr. Hill as they examined the pages of an illustrated manuscript. Miss Cornyn, her neck still swathed in the beautiful necklace, sat at one of the desks, her eyes focused on a ledger as she recorded information in neat columns.

  All three gasped when they saw Beatrice.

  Miss Cornyn rushed over to offer succor, Mr. Cornyn swore in surprise, and Mr. Hill shrunk back in horror.

  “I apologize if Mr. Wright’s appearance startled you,” the duke said solicitously. “I did everything I could to dissuade him from returning, but he was adamant that we finish our business here immediately and I was forced to agree. It is always better to conclude unpleasantness as quickly as possible.”

  “But what happened to put him in such a condition?” Mr. Cornyn asked confounded. “Did your carriage overturn? Were you assaulted by a pickpocket? Never say you caused this yourself with clumsiness.”

  “There must be something we can do to help with the swelling,” his daughter said, looking at Bea, then Kesgrave. “Perhaps some ice? It helps with my father’s joints, which ache from time to time.”

  Mr. Hill remained silent, and Bea wished her vision was better so she could see the fear in his eyes. He knew exactly why they had returned.

  “Please don’t make a fuss,” Bea said, assuring them her injuries were the result of a minor accident and hardly bothered her now. “We are here for one purpose and one purpose only: to apprehend Mr. Hill for the murder of Robert Hanson Crestwell, Earl of Fazeley. I hope you will come without a struggle, but the duke’s coachman is on hand to assure your compliance.”

  Although Jenkins stepped forward to make his presence felt, none of the occupants in the small office paid him any attention. Mr. Hill’s face whitened to such an alarming degree even Bea could see the difference with her diminished perspective, and he looked around in every direction, as if compulsively examining the scene. Mr. Cornyn launched into an interrogation of the duke, demanding why he would let a lackey make such an astounding and erroneous accusation. Miss Cornyn began to sob at once and chant, “No, no, no, no.”

  “You are clearly a man of pronounced intelligence, so I do not understand why you would allow your steward to spew such nonsensical drivel,” Mr. Cornyn said.

  “No, no, no,” Miss Cornyn wailed, her hands in fists as tears wet her beautiful face.

  “Indeed, it’s your duty to restrain your servants from behaving in disgraceful ways in public,” he continued, “which is something even the most lettuce-headed turnip knows.”

  “No, no, no.”

  “And to permit him to make this astounding accusation here,” Mr. Cornyn added, his tone a mix of surprise and disgust, “in the presence of my daughter, a delicate young woman who has done nothing to deserve such distress, is above all things—”

  “No!” Miss Cornyn said, her voice trembling as the scream tore from her. “It was me. I did it. I murdered Lord Fazeley.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  In the silence that followed Miss Cornyn’s stunning admission, Beatrice tried to reorder her thoughts to make them align with the new information. It took very little imagination to come up with a reason why the beautiful young woman would want the rakish lord dead, for he had taken her innocence and then callously tossed her aside when the affair grew tedious. Perhaps she had learned from reading his memoir that she was one of an assortment and not the special bloom he had sworn her to be.

  Just another plucked rose in a bouquet of plucked roses.

  How she must have seethed with anger at that discovery, her fury growing and growing until she could no longer contain it, and after a meeting with her father in which the high and mighty Lord Fazeley was informed his prose was not adequate, she decided to drive the knife deeper by driving in the knife.

  It made perfect sense, she realized.

  “No,” Mr. Hill said, his face suddenl
y swamped with color. “I did it.”

  Mr. Cornyn looked at both of them as if they had each lost their mind, and Jenkins muttered, “Cor blimey.”

  “He’s lying,” Miss Cornyn said with deathly calm, entirely in control of herself. Even the tears ceased to fall. “I killed him because he was a heartless cad. He seduced and abandoned me, and for that he had to pay.”

  “Good God, what?” shrieked her father.

  Both confessors ignored the deeply shocked proprietor of the Sylvan Press and stared at each other imploringly.

  “No, Miss Cornyn,” Mr. Hill said firmly, “I killed Lord Fazeley because he was a heartless cad. He seduced and abandoned you, and for that he had to pay.”

  But Miss Cornyn could not let it stand and turned to Kesgrave to plea for her own guilt. “Please, your grace, do not listen to him. He’s only trying to save me, but I don’t deserve to be saved. I have been willful and wicked, and I deserve any punishment that comes my way.”

  Mr. Hill took several steps toward the duke and said, “Consider it, your grace. Miss Cornyn is too sweet and delicate to have done this evil act. But you know I’m not. You know I attacked Mr. Wright in the street not half an hour ago. You know it. I could see it in your eyes the moment you stepped into the office.”

  Miss Cornyn let out a strangled cry as she looked first at Bea’s bruised face and then at her father’s associate. She began to cry again. “But why, Mr. Hill? Why would you do such an awful thing to that poor man?”

  He shook his head, as if unable to explain, then said, “It was a mistake. A horrible mistake. I saw the way he looked at you and responded with fury. White-hot fury. I feared he would hurt you the way the earl hurt you. See, Miss Cornyn, I am no good. Let me go to the gallows for you to atone for my sin. It would be an honor.”