Lilly glanced down at her hand and the very large emerald that winked on her finger. It was all really happening, she thought. “I suppose we should. It was rather nice of Lord Highcliff to arrange everything just so.”
Val laughed at that. “Highcliff has been called many things, Lilly. I doubt nice has ever been one of them, but I will be certain to tell him so. He will enjoy that tremendously.”
*
The carriage rumbled through the streets of London, its pace often slowed and sometimes even halted by the congestion that was a plague on the city. Highcliff was draped across one seat with practiced indolence and an expression of disaffected ennui. Effie sat on the opposite bench facing him, prim, proper and all the things a lady should be. He watched her for a moment and noted that she watched him, as well. Some things would never change it seemed. No matter how different they were and no matter the past that lay between them.
“The curtains are closed,” she said, after a long and silent moment. “You need not put on such an act in here for me… not when we both know the truth.”
His lips quirked even as he sat up and assumed what was a more normal posture for him. There were times when the act of addlepated dandy exhausted him. But it had been worth its weight in gold with the information to which he had become privy to as a result. After all, people were willing to say just about anything in front of a person they thought to be both stupid and disinterested.
“All of your charges are getting married off—and to titled gentlemen to boot. Soon, you’ll have a line of matchmaking mamas at your door demanding entry for their desperate daughters,” he observed.
“My charges have no mothers and they have, at best, disinterested fathers. I’m not interested in taking on pupils who have parents to see to their futures,” she replied sharply.
“Always the savior, Effie,” he murmured softly. “Who saves you?”
“I do not need saving,” she replied. “You know that better than anyone.”
Recalling the night they’d met, the terrible moment when she’d been forced to defend herself against something no woman should ever have to endure, his fists clenched. No, he hadn’t saved her. She’d saved herself, leaving the man who would have assaulted her writhing on the ground in agony as she’d dusted off her torn and dusty skirts. It had been a darkened highway in the countryside. Two drunken louts who’d fancied themselves highwaymen had stopped her carriage. One had decided to take more than just her purse. As he’d ridden up onto the scene, one man had fled, leaving the other in the middle of his attempted assault which she had soundly thwarted with a well-aimed warming pan.
“I suppose I do,” he agreed.
“When will you give it all up?” she asked, changing the subject abruptly.
“When there are no more traitors amongst us or when I have drawn my last breath,” he answered honestly. Ferreting out those who profited at the expense of their own countrymen was the only skill he possessed that was of use to anyone. He’d made it his life’s work. But it had taken much more from him than simply time. His entire life was a lie and his soul grew blacker and more bitter from it by the day.
“And at what cost to you? You live a constant charade, Nicholas, hiding behind a mask!” She reached across the distance of the carriage and grasped his hand in hers.
It was a gesture meant to comfort. He knew that. But it burned him like a brand, nonetheless.
She continued imploringly. “If you do not cease this, there will be nothing left of you to save. You lose yourself to it a little more every day.”
Deliberately, he pried her hand from his. “Be careful the filth of me does not rub off on you. I would not have you stain yourself on my account. I’ll not add that to the black marks that already darken my conscience.”
She pulled back, almost as if he’d struck her. “We were friends once.”
They had never been friends. Or rather he had not. He had loved her from the first and, even then, he’d known that he was unworthy of her. But he’d played the part of boon companion for as long as he could because it had given him the chance to bask in her presence. “Friends? Is that what we were? It was a lark, Effie… two young people enjoying the summer in the countryside before the harsh realities of the world intruded.”
Pain flared in the depths of her warm, green eyes. Just as quickly it was gone, masked by her uncanny ability to use etiquette as armor. “Regardless of the circumstances in which our friendship ended, my affection for you was genuine, then as now. You will always have it, whether you wish to or not.”
“Why did you refuse Sutton’s offer, Effie? Surely it wasn’t out of affection for me?” He was twisting the knife, being cruel to be kind. He wanted to stamp out any lingering softness she held in her heart for him.
“I refused Sutton because I did not wish to marry Sutton. Contrary to your overblown sense of self-worth, people do make decisions in this world that have absolutely nothing to do with you,” she chided.
He grinned, but it was a cold expression, one that hinted at the darkness that had become a part of him over the years. “So my half-brother, then the heir apparent before his unfortunate duel, deigned to offer the role of lady wife to the bastard daughter of a neighbor. The daughter who happened to be the only friend of his own bastard half-brother born of their mother’s infidelity… a girl, I might add, that he’d never even before looked at. Yet, it had nothing to do with me? If you believe his offer was based on anything more than his hatred of me and his desire to take something he thought was mine… well, you are fooling yourself about him as much as you ever have about me.”
“I cannot attest to his motives in making the offer, only to my own in my refusal. I didn’t wish to be his wife,” she said simply.
“And did you ever wish to be mine?” He wanted to call the words back, to have never spoken that secret desire to her. It left him naked and vulnerable in a way that he had never been with another soul in his life.
“No,” she said firmly. “I adored you, Nicholas. I enjoyed your company, your wit… but I knew even then that you were not a man meant to be my husband. Nor any woman’s for that matter. It wasn’t simply that you found yourself in danger, but that you courted it with a recklessness and abandon that told me the truth of it from the outset. You wanted to die. I knew that you’d never make yourself into a husband whether you wed or not, but whatever poor woman was foolish enough to try being a wife to you would quickly be made into a widow.”
He wanted to deny it. He wanted to tell her she was wrong. But he’d never lied to her even if he’d had to lie to others in her presence. She always knew the truth of him, it seemed. “And since you couldn’t save the bastard son who loved you, you saved the bastard daughters of the world that made him.”
“I saved those who reminded me of where I might have been had my father been a different man.”
A man like yours. She didn’t utter those words. They didn’t have to be spoken. But they hung between them just the same. Everything about him that she now detested and feared had been forged as much by the cruelty of the man the world knew as his father as by the violence he’d witnessed and dealt during the war. That boy she’d known, the one who loved her and saw her as so far above him, that boy was no more. He’d been stamped out and eradicated years before.
The carriage halted in front of the elegant Georgian townhouse that functioned as the Darrow School for Girls. It was a reprieve, but not truly a welcome one. “You are home,” he said. “I would help you down, but it’s best by all accounts that we are not seen together.”
She rose and moved toward the door of the carriage. At the last moment, she turned and looked back at him. “I still have your chess board. You are welcome to come for a game anytime. You know where my study is.”
“I do,” he said. But he didn’t offer any commitment to the invitation. They both knew he would accept it however. He couldn’t do anything else. Being in her presence cut him like a dull blade every time—jagged, p
ainful and deep. Despite that, the pain of being forever absent from her life was more than he could bear. So he would accept her olive branch and return some night to play chess with her while he quietly railed against the fact that nothing else could ever exist between them.
Chapter Fifteen
They did not go immediately to Highcliff’s Richmond home, but instructed the driver to take them instead to the small office in Cheapside that housed the offices of the solicitor Lilly’s great-aunt had retained. They needed answers about the bequest and who would benefit if Lilly failed to meet the terms set forth.
As they neared the address, Val surveyed her in the pretty amethyst-colored day dress she wore. His ring winked on her finger and the posy she’d carried during the ceremony was still clutched in her hand. “It isn’t exactly how one envisions spending their wedding day, is it?” he asked.
“I’d never envisioned having a wedding day,” she admitted. “As a rule, governesses and companions simply fade slowly into spinsterhood. Marriage and weddings are not supposed to be for us, only for the girls we help to raise.”
“But you don’t like rules,” he said with a smile. “And so you’ve broken another one, shattering expectations of you left and right, as it were.”
She laughed softly at that. “I suppose I have.”
The carriage door opened and the driver lowered the steps. Val climbed out first and then reached back for her, taking her hand. “Let’s go see what we can find out about who may have tried to murder you, shall we?”
She shivered at that, but nodded in agreement.
Together, they entered the building and climbed the stairs to the small office on the second floor. It was dark and dingy, smelling of mold and something else he could not quite name. Knocking softly on the aged wood with its cracked and peeling paint, the door slowly swung inward. The hair on his neck lifted, standing on end as his skin prickled with the sense of looming danger.
“Wait here,” he said.
“In the hall? For anyone to come by? I think not. I may be a bit reckless and dislike rules, but there is one rule that I will not break today. There is safety in numbers,” she said firmly.
It was logic he couldn’t fault. “Stay close to me.”
“Closer than your own shadow,” she said.
Entering the offices slowly, they paused in the small antechamber. There was a deserted desk there and a handful of chairs. Another door opened off the room and it was ajar. The smell from the hall grew stronger the deeper they moved into that space and he knew instantly what it was. Death.
“Nothing good will be found behind that door, Lilly. You don’t have to look,” he said.
“You don’t know what the solicitor looked like, Val. I do. If it is Mr. Littleton… we’ll go together,” she insisted.
He hated that she was correct. But there was nothing to be done for it. Using the toe of his boot, he pushed the door open further and stepped inside. The terrible smell pervaded everything. Whoever had killed him, Val would bet, had done so right after the poor man’s initial meeting with Lilly. It was a wonder she hadn’t been murdered while sitting in the man’s office.
They found him slumped on the floor behind his desk. There was a puddle of blood, long since congealed, beneath his head that spread out in a rivulet over the carpet and the uneven floorboards. Next to the body lay the discarded weapon, a wicked-looking tool used to stoke the fire in the brazier that occupied one corner of the room.
“We need to summon the watch,” Lilly whispered, her voice strained. “That is Mr. Littleton. Oh, Val, you don’t think this happened because of me, do you? This poor man—”
“This didn’t happen because of you,” he said. “This happened because of someone else’s greed. You are not at all responsible even if this is in some way tied to the bequest from your great-aunt. The killer alone bears sole responsibility for this man’s death and likely for the attempt on your life. Though, on that score, we still cannot discount Elsworth.”
“He’s had to be dead for days now! Possibly since the same day I met with him!” Lilly said in dismay. “With everything that Elsworth has done, I was certain it would be him, but now—well, I’m just not sure anymore.”
“I do think he likely died just after you left this office. Which begs the question of why you made it home unaccosted save for a crow stealing your bonnet,” he said. “They would have followed you, Lilly, and they would have eliminated you before eliminating him.”
“Eliminated.” She said the word as if it left a sour taste in her mouth. “What a terrible way to put it! What if… Val, what if they were following? What if my encounter with you in the park was the only thing that prevented them from… I was too distracted by everything to consider it. I can’t say I was being followed, but I can’t say I wasn’t either!”
“Lilly, this is too upsetting for you—”
“Yes, it is,” she agreed. “But I’m not upset with you or even your choice of words. Because it’s accurate. Eliminated. Like a problem or a nuisance. An inconvenience. That’s what I’ve always been in life… to my mother, to my father and now, apparently, to whoever else stands to gain from my great-aunt’s generosity.”
He had no answer for that. His own father had been distant and uninvolved, but Val had known that he had his father’s love even if it was absent at the best of times. And his mother had loved him the best she could when he was very young, before he’d lost her to her own melancholy long before he’d lost her to the permanency of death. Even his grandmother, managing and cantankerous as she could be, was only interested in what was best for him. Other than Miss Euphemia Darrow and her half-sister, Lilly had no one to put her needs and safety first. Certainly, the people who should have seen to those things had failed her terribly.
“We need to summon the watch,” he said.
“We need to find the documents pertaining to the bequest… if they’re not here, then we know that whoever killed him took them, and we can be absolutely certain that the bequest was the cause of his death.”
Val wanted to protest. Remaining there was dangerous and damning. But she wasn’t wrong. “Five minutes,” he said. “If we don’t find it in five minutes, then we give up. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” she said.
“I’ll take the desk. There’s less chance of my clothing disturbing the scene or being… stained,” he finished.
She swallowed convulsively then nodded. “Right. I’ll check the cabinets over here,” she said and swept her hand toward a large barrister case in the corner and another piece of darkly-finished furniture next to it.
Stepping around the body carefully, Val began combing through the documents on top of the desk. “What was your great-aunt’s name?”
“Margaret Hazleton, Lady Marchebanks,” she answered.
Val stopped in his tracks. “You can’t be serious!”
“Well, of course, I’m serious. I’d hardly joke about something at a time like this. Why does that matter?”
“Because her nephew, or rather her husband’s nephew, is one of the men with whom Elsworth is in business. All of these mysteries are connected, Lilly, and we get deeper into the middle of it every time we turn around.”
“Find the bequest and let’s get out of here,” she said with a shiver. “I’m starting to have a terrible feeling about all of this.”
He went back to searching the desk as she searched the barrister case. Finally, in the bottom drawer, he found a lock box. Taking it out of the drawer, he placed it on the desk. “Give me two of your hair pins,” he said.
Immediately, she withdrew two pins from the mass of dark curls and walked over to press them into his hand. It didn’t take Val long to pick the lock. Inside, he found the will and the additional instructions left. Tucking both into his pocket, he returned the pins to her just as a floorboard creaked in the antechamber.
“What was that?” she whispered.
“Someone’s here,” he replied just as quietly. “Come o
n.”
They crept toward the door to the outer office. Val peered out but saw no one. Hoping that the noise had just been someone passing by in the hall, he motioned for Lilly to follow him quietly as they moved through the small antechamber. As they neared the door, another noise, the scrape of furniture moving on a wooden floor, sounded behind them. He looked back just in time to see the heavy desk being shoved toward them, pushing them back toward the wall as a man darted past them. Val didn’t have the opportunity to see much more than a shock of blond hair that looked strikingly similar to his cousin.
“Damn and blast. Are you hurt?” he asked her.
She had her hand pressed to her chest, over her heart. “Only startled. No. Not startled! Frightened half to death. We have to go… if he comes back with others, I cannot imagine what danger we will face.”
He could. And it was the same fate that had met the unfortunate Mr. Littleton. “Let’s get the bloody hell out of here.”
*
They were nearing Lord Highcliff’s home in Richmond and Lilly was marginally calmer. Not that she’d ever been hysterical, but finding a corpse was certainly an uncommon occurrence for her. During the journey, Val had been perusing the documents pertaining to the bequest.
“This is the strangest thing I’ve ever seen,” he finally said.
“What is it?”
“There’s no mention in here of the funds being released upon your great-aunt’s death. Everything states that the funds will come to you when you marry. So… you’re certain that he stated she was frail and ill?”
Lilly considered it carefully. “Well, he said she was ill… and that my seeing her was an impossibility. That I’d never get to her in time. But he didn’t say time for what. Death was implied but never stated specifically.”
“Lady Marchebanks, to my knowledge, is neither old and infirmed nor particularly frail… she is, in fact, quite healthy. Which begs the question why? Why the secrecy?”
Lilly shrugged. “It is a scandal. The very public seduction of my mother, my illegitimate birth, her suicide… those are all very valid reasons for not wanting to publicly acknowledge our kinship.”
Barefoot in Hyde Park (The Hellion Club Book 2) Page 13
