A rush of relief flooded from him so intensely that it seeped into her.
“And you?” She reached up to touch his brow and the deep cut there that trickled blood down his face. “Dear God…Merritt!” She dropped her gaze over his body and nearly cried out. So much blood! “Are you all right?”
He gave a curt nod and slipped his arms around her to draw her against him, heedless of the blood.
She buried her mouth against his shoulder and whispered against his hot skin, “You left me…” You left me to chase after a dead woman.
“He was going to kill you,” he justified simply.
His words fell through her with an icy tremor, and not because of what might have happened to her. He’d killed one man tonight to protect her, had almost killed a second. Yet she knew he hadn’t truly been saving her at all.
He’d still been trying to save Joanna.
He loosened his hold on her and stepped back. She flashed numb as she watched him kneel down beside the dead man, his face inscrutable, his every movement carefully controlled. Emotionless. The man she’d made love to was gone; in his place was a cold and detached hunter.
“That man who attacked you tonight,” he called out to her over his shoulder. “You said he had a tattoo. Where?”
“The left side of his neck.”
He grabbed the dead man’s shirt and ripped the collar back. A key-shaped tattoo marked his skin. “Like this?”
She nodded.
“The same one as on Liggett’s uniform,” he bit out grimly.
He let go of the man’s shirt and stood. Without explanation, he crossed to the armoire, flung open the doors, and pulled out two shirts, waistcoats, breeches, and sets of braces. He kept one set of clothes for himself and tossed the second onto the bed over her ruined gown.
He nodded at them as he stepped up to the washstand in the corner. “Put those on.” He poured water into the basin and began to wash. “And hurry.”
Fresh fear rose inside her. “Why? What are you going to do?”
With water dripping down his face and turning the water in the bowl blood-red, he pinned her with a gaze of fierce resolve. It was unlike any she’d ever seen from him before, so intense that it shivered like a cold wind across her skin and slammed her heart into her throat.
“I’m ending this,” he promised. “Tonight.”
Twenty-one
When Merritt offered his hand to Madame Noir to help her out of the carriage, she glanced up at the sandstone town house, then slid him a sideways look. “Where have you brought me, Snake?”
“Somewhere interesting,” he assured her as he led her to the footpath. “Besides, you’re getting paid for your time. And quite well, too.”
Madame sniffed and turned away at that reminder that she was nothing if not mercenary.
He reached back into the carriage for Veronica, although she certainly didn’t need his help. But he wanted to hold her hand in his, if only for a few fleeting moments, to buoy him up for what was to come. He couldn’t stop the twist of worry in his gut that she was here. But she’d refused to go to the Armory where he could set guards to protect her.
She’d changed from his ill-fitting clothes into her battle outfit, complete with weapons, that they’d retrieved from the Court of Miracles. Thankfully, Filipe and his men had done nothing to stop them from collecting her belongings, including the pair of earbobs she’d slipped into her pocket when she thought Merritt wasn’t watching.
“You pulled Madame away from her business,” Veronica reminded him. “The least you can do is tell her why we’re here.”
“I will,” he conceded and escorted the two women to the front door. “When the time is right.”
He pounded the brass knocker and waited. The town house wasn’t dark. Lamplight glowed behind the closed shutters in the front windows.
They were expected.
The door opened a crack, and Clayton Elliott peered out, one hand on the door handle and the other beneath his jacket on the pistol he kept there. He silently stepped back to let them inside.
“You know Veronica,” Merritt mumbled in introduction to Clayton.
He nodded at her. “Nice to see you again, Miss Chase.”
“And this is the illustrious Madame Noir of Le Château Noir.” Merritt took Madame’s arm and led her forward. “Madame Noir, Major Clayton Elliott.”
“Madame.” Clayton sketched her a bow.
“A pleasure to meet you, Major.” Her interested gaze traveled over him. “Very much a pleasure.” She smiled flirtatiously and held out her hand. “And to what do I owe this pleasant meeting?”
“Merritt didn’t tell you during the carriage ride?” Clayton grinned and accepted her hand in greeting. “I’m an undersecretary with the Home Office.”
Snatching her hand away, she muttered icily beneath her breath to Merritt, “You duplicitous little snake! To bring me here like this, to meet—”
“He’s the one paying you for your time this evening,” Merritt calmly informed her.
“In that case, my price just doubled.” She plastered a false but bright smile on her face for Clayton. “How may I be of service, Mr. Elliott?”
Clayton glanced over his shoulder into the dining room where a woman sat tied to a chair. Merritt knew without being told… Malmesbury’s mistress.
“The woman who lives here has information I need,” Clayton told her. “We’ll be questioning her tonight.”
“Torture,” Madame purred delightedly. “How delicious! I’m quite good with whips and spurs.”
Clayton slid a dubious glance to Merritt, then cleared his throat. “Hopefully, it won’t come to that.”
“Pity.” Madame sniffed.
Wisely, Clayton didn’t reply. “I’ll be conducting the questioning,” he told them in a low voice so they wouldn’t be overheard. Then he turned his attention to Merritt. “While I’m talking to her, I want you and Miss Chase to search the house for any evidence that connects her to the riots, no matter how small. Madame Noir, I would like you to linger a few feet away and listen in to what she has to say.”
“Why should I do that?”
“You know women.”
“I know men,” she corrected pointedly. The no-nonsense look she leveled on Clayton would have done a governess proud. “Before I take one more step, I want to know what’s going on here and who that woman is. Snake has told me nothing.”
“Snake?” Clayton puzzled.
“Me.” Merritt grinned. He slipped his arm familiarly around Madame’s shoulders and gave her an affectionate squeeze. “Madame and I have a close and loving relationship.”
She arched a brow. “Is that what you call continuously threatening to send me to Australia?”
“No relationship is perfect.”
She pushed his arm away and scowled irritably.
“She’s Charlotte Jones,” Clayton explained, ignoring their antics. “The Earl of Malmesbury’s mistress and someone we think is involved with the riots. Do you know her?”
“No. But I’m always interested in meeting new colleagues.” She nodded toward the dining room without blinking an eye, as if seeing a bound woman was an everyday occurrence. From what went on at Le Château Noir, it most likely was. “Shall we begin? I need to return soon to my guests.”
“Of course.” Clayton gestured politely. “After you.”
As Madame walked past, she trailed her hand suggestively down Clayton’s arm.
He froze and stared after her for several long seconds, then turned to shoot Merritt a questioning quirk of his brow.
“She’ll be useful,” Merritt promised. “Trust me.”
“And how exactly do you know her?”
“Don’t ask,” Merritt muttered.
He took Veronica’s arm to lead her toward the stairs to start their sea
rch.
“I want to speak with you,” he told her quietly. “We need to talk about what happened tonight.”
She cast an uncertain glance as Clayton walked into the dining room with a friendly smile for Miss Jones and pulled a chair up in front of hers to begin his interrogation. “Now isn’t a good time.”
“When we were attacked tonight—”
“Merritt, please. Not now.” A plea for mercy filled her voice, as if she knew what he was about to say. And couldn’t bear it.
She slipped her arm away and hurried up the stairs before he could stop her.
Biting back a curse, he had no choice but to let her go. For now. But she couldn’t avoid him forever. One way or another, the battle they’d started the night they met would finally end.
“Miss Jones,” Clayton began casually, as if the two of them were discussing nothing more important than the weather, “why don’t you tell me about your relationship to Lord Malmesbury? He keeps you in very comfortable circumstances here.”
Pulling in a patient breath, Merritt walked into the adjoining parlor and began to search it. He looked for anything that would tie Charlotte Jones to Liggett, Smathers, the riots…Scepter. Every drawer and its underside was checked, every locked cabinet pried open with the tip of his knife and searched.
Meanwhile, Madame Noir helped herself to a cup of tea from the tray resting on the dining room table. Then she leaned back against the doorframe between the dining room and the parlor and settled in to observe.
That was Madame, all right. Merritt grimaced as he shut the door of the parlor closet after finding nothing of importance inside. Always her own sovereign. What he wouldn’t have paid at that moment to have her locked in a room with the prince regent. God only knew which one of them would come out alive.
Taking his lead from Madame, Clayton poured a cup of tea, then untied Miss Jones’s arms. If Merritt were a betting man, he’d have wagered in the book at White’s that one of Clayton’s men had tied her up just so Clayton could be the one who compassionately untied her. A twisted knight in shining armor, complete with sugared tea and biscuits.
Thank God Clayton was on their side.
“Here, Miss Jones.” Clayton’s expression softened with concern as he handed her the teacup. “I find that tea always makes things better.”
The woman hesitated, then gave a jerking nod. Her fingers trembled as she reached to accept the tea.
“I want to help you, I truly do,” Clayton cajoled in a soft voice. “But I need more information to prove your innocence.”
As Merritt stepped up beside Madame, she rolled her eyes at Clayton and muttered against the rim of her teacup, “And I thought you were the snake.”
Merritt’s lips twisted. “Clayton’s very good at getting the information he wants.”
“Hmm.” She lowered her cup and listened.
Clayton continued, “We know you’re involved with General Horatio Liggett, that you’ve been spending time with him.” He paused a beat. “Intimately.”
Miss Jones’s eyes widened. “How do you know that?”
Oh, he was good, Merritt reflected. Because Clayton hadn’t known. The connection had been a wild guess until just now.
Her shoulders shook as she admitted, “The general and I have been…close.”
Merritt glanced at Madame, happy to be proved right about Clayton’s interrogation skills. But she kept her gaze pinned to Miss Jones.
A sob tore from the woman. Her cup clinked softly against the saucer as she set it down, as if afraid in her distress that her shaking hand might spill it.
“I-I only did…as Malmesbury…asked of me,” she choked out between sobs. Her slender shoulders hunched forward, her gaze guiltily fixed on her tea as it rested on her knee. “He asked me to…to take the general into my bed.”
That last was said so softly that Merritt could barely hear her. But Madame heard and frowned.
Miss Jones pulled in a shuddering breath. “To settle an old debt between them.”
“And that’s how you came to know the general?” Clayton asked understandingly. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to her.
She nodded and dabbed at her eyes. “When the general came to my door, he had a letter from Malmesbury instructing me to make him feel welcome.” She paused, holding the bit of linen against her nose. “I knew what Malmesbury meant.”
“Are you certain he meant that?”
“This is how I make my way through the world, sir.” She gave him an indignant look that he would doubt her. “Pleasing Malmesbury is what keeps me from starving on the streets.”
Madame’s frown sharpened.
“Has the general been staying here with you?” Clayton asked.
“Heavens no!”
“Then who’s been using your carriage?”
She blinked. “My carriage?”
“It was seen three nights ago in front of the Ship’s Bell near the Strand. A man who has been connected to the leaders of the recent riots was seen climbing inside. The question I have is who was he meeting inside your carriage?”
“It wasn’t me.” Her face turned white. “It must have been the general. He’d asked to borrow the carriage, so of course I let him.” She took a comforting sip of tea, but her color didn’t return. “He was here at Malmesbury’s behest, and I am not foolish enough to deny a request from an old friend of the earl’s. But I don’t know where he went or what he did. I don’t know anything about the riots.”
Clayton’s face remained inscrutable. “Liggett didn’t tell you that he’s been given orders to use his soldiers to put down the unrest? That innocent men and boys might be killed in the clash?” He paused just long enough to draw her full attention to his next question. “Or that he knows the men who are responsible for starting them?”
“No, he never…” She pressed the back of her hand against her lips and whispered her confession through her fingers. “I saw him for only one night, for a few hours at most. I wanted to please Malmesbury, that’s all…just please my protector.”
Clayton put a concerned hand on the woman’s arm to comfort her. She sobbed into his handkerchief.
Madame shifted closer to Merritt. “She’s lying. Her relationship with the general isn’t at all what she claims.” She muttered against the rim of the cup as she raised it to her lips, “Oh, she’s a good actress—very good, indeed. But she’s lying.”
Merritt narrowed his eyes on Miss Jones. “How do you know?”
“I know men, remember?” She nodded over her teacup at Miss Jones. “What man—and a general no less—would lower himself by using the carriage of another man’s mistress? And a mistress he’d tupped only because that man was in his debt?” She shook her head at the idea. “None I’ve ever known, and I’ve known all kinds.”
No, she’d been intimate with all kinds. And for that hard-won experience, Merritt was willing to hear her out. “If he’d already visited her bed, what would he care as long as the carriage was convenient?”
She slid him a look as if he were a bedlamite. “All those years you spent studying the law yet learning not one thing about men…” She gave a long-suffering sigh at the waste of it, then explained, “After intimacy is exactly when a man strives to show off how manly and powerful he is. Trust me. He’d walk his boot soles thin before he allowed himself to be seen in the carriage of another man’s mistress.”
A low warning prickled at the backs of Merritt’s knees, and his gaze flicked back to Miss Jones. If she was lying, then—
“Merritt?” Veronica called out from upstairs. “I think you should come up here.” A short pause, then far more firmly, “Now.”
He hurried up the stairs and found her in the front bedroom. The door to the old servants’ passageway that was meant to blend into the paneling and wallpaper of the bedroom’s walls stood open wide
. Veronica stared inside.
She mumbled, “I think the Home Office might be interested in this.”
“Then grab it,” he said as he entered the room. “Clayton’s nearly done interrogating Miss Jones. We’ll take it away with us in the carriage.”
Both of her brows rose in incredulity. “We’re going to need a bigger carriage.”
Merritt came up behind her and peered over her shoulder. He blinked. “Good God…”
The space that had once been used by servants to come and go unseen had been filled with shelves stacked full with small bags of coins, banknotes, account books, and various goods that hungry and poor men living on the streets would find to be a godsend. All of which Merritt had no doubt was meant to pay former soldiers to riot.
“I think we’ve found the person who’s been giving money to Smathers,” he muttered and picked up one of the small bags of coins. They jangled softly as he bounced the bag on his palm.
“I should say so.” Veronica turned to face him, leaning a shoulder against the wall. “But why would Miss Jones be involved with riots? And how did she acquire all this money?”
“I don’t know.” He tossed the bag back onto the shelf and closed the door. “But I bet we can find out.”
“There’s something more.” A grim tone edged her voice. “I also found this in her jewelry box.”
Veronica held up a necklace, letting it fall from her fingers by its long chain. A large pendant in the shape of a key dangled from its end. The same symbol that had been tattooed on the men who had attacked them tonight.
The same symbol that connected all of them to Liggett.
Veronica followed on Merritt’s heels as he hurried downstairs to Clayton. He put his hand on Clayton’s shoulder and leaned down to speak quietly into his ear.
Clayton’s gaze swung from Merritt to Miss Jones, where it narrowed with such intensity that Veronica shivered, even on the other side of the room.
Merritt surreptitiously slipped the wadded-up necklace into Clayton’s hand and retreated to Veronica’s side as she lingered with Madame Noir.
An Extraordinary Lord Page 23
