“…which comes in twice a week, whether we like it or not.” Rupert chuckled, dragging Jack’s attention back to the moment. He must have noticed Jack’s stern expression, as his face fell. “Have you ever eaten caviar?”
“Yes,” Jack answered, feeling no desire to elaborate.
“So you understand the conundrum, then.” Rupert’s grin returned.
Jack didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about. He had no interest in understanding either. “Quite,” he answered, throwing as much noble inflection into the single word as he could.
Rupert evidently didn’t hear the sarcasm. He marched on at a jaunty pace, gesturing toward a room at the end of the hall as he walked. “This is our den, of course,” he said, picking up his pace a little. “No one owns any of the rooms in the club per se, but it is generally acknowledged that each group of particular friends has their own patch to protect and defend. I’m sure you know all about that.”
Jack’s mind instantly wandered back to his childhood, to the alley that ran between Mrs. Farringdon’s and the pub next door. He and his chums had claimed that alley as their own. It was where some of the boys slept when it wasn’t raining or freezing. They’d all had cubby holes where they stashed their private treasures. And while Jack had always hated the idea of thievery, it was cherished territory to some of his friends, who claimed exclusive rights to picking the pockets of the drunks that stumbled out the back door of the pub late at night.
“I do,” he muttered, certain Rupert didn’t have a clue what a patch really meant to most of London.
“Ah. Good. The gang’s all assembled,” Rupert said as they headed into the room. “Gentlemen, Baron Clerkenwell and I have arrived.”
Jack winced inwardly at his blasted title. At least Rupert hadn’t called him John. He already knew Rupert’s friends and considered it ridiculous to be introduced to them at all.
“Gentlemen,” he greeted them all with a nod.
“Clerkenwell,” Lord Reese Howsden greeted him with a smile, standing from the overstuffed chair where he sat reading The Times.
“Welcome to the fold.” John Darrow—or perhaps Jack was supposed to think of him and address him as Lord Whitlock now—came forward to shake his hand.
“Cheeky devil,” Harrison Manfred, Lord Landsbury, dropped what he was doing to come over and shake Jack’s hand as well. “I always knew you were a smart one.”
“I’m not sure if smart is the word for it,” Frederick Herrington said, approaching to shake Jack’s hand when Harrison let it go. “Hello, Jack,” he said in a far softer, friendlier, and more accepting tone. He made direct eye contact without any guile or teasing. “Congratulations on your marriage.”
“Thanks,” Jack said, relieved that at least one of Rupert’s friends wasn’t a complete nobhead.
“The man of the hour,” Fergus O’Shea said with a grin as he rolled his wheelchair toward Jack from the table where he’d been playing cards with the other. He reached up to shake Jack’s hand, then tugged him closer to his own level. “Come to spill more information about the investigation?” he asked, winking his one remaining eye.
A bittersweet sense of rightness rested on Jack’s shoulders. Fergus too remembered who he actually was.
“They took the investigation away from me,” he said, crossing to sit at the table with the abandoned card game as Rupert and his friends resumed their seats. “They took all of my investigations away from me.”
Rupert, John, and Harrison seemed embarrassed and flustered by Jack’s blunt statement. Reese, Freddy, and Fergus looked far more sympathetic.
“Bad luck, that,” Reese said, crossing to the room’s large fireplace and taking a carved box from the mantel. He brought it to the table and offered Jack a cigar, but Jack waved him off.
“It’s more than bad luck,” he said. “It’s foolhardy and dangerous.”
“Brandy?” John offered, holding up a decanter at the small table near one of the room’s windows.
“No, thank you,” Jack said as politely as he could. Who drank brandy in the late morning?
Nobs, that’s who.
“How dangerous?” Freddy asked with a frown.
Jack was grateful for the man’s focus. “I was working on more than just finding the connection between Fergus’s attack and Denbigh. There are any number of crimes that not only need to be solved, but that need to be prevented.”
“And Scotland Yard just let those cases drop when they promoted you?” Rupert asked, looking uneasy. As well he should, as far as Jack was concerned. As a member of Bianca’s family, he was just as responsible as Lord Malcolm for the way things had fallen apart.
“My assistant, Martin Poole, was promoted to my old position and given my caseload. But Poole has less experience, and he was already investigating a few things on his own. I don’t think they’ve given him the resources to pursue every lead in every case that needs attention.”
“Then pursue them yourself,” Fergus said with a particularly mercenary glint in his eye. Coupled with the patch he wore over his lost eye, the expression made him look like a ginger-haired pirate. He shrugged and went on. “Who cares what Scotland Yard says? You’re the one with the contacts. You’re the one with the information. What would they do if you managed to solve some of those cases without their permission? Punish you by promoting you even higher?”
Jack knew there was a reason he liked Fergus O’Shea. He grinned. It felt like his first genuine grin in weeks. “You can’t get much higher than Assistant Commissioner,” he said.
“Deputy Commissioner,” Harrison said with a shrug. “The Commissioner.”
“Sir Edmund Henderson isn’t going to give up his cozy chair so easily,” John pointed out, sweeping the abandoned cards from their earlier game into a pile and shuffling them.
“Sir Edmund will be gone within a year or two,” Jack said, frustrated enough with the man to hint at inside information that wasn’t common knowledge. “But the top job has only ever gone to a man with military experience.”
“Which you don’t have,” Harrison said, nodding in understanding.
Jack stared across the table at the man, trying to figure out if his comment was a dig or a simple observation. In the end, he chose to give the man the benefit of the doubt. If these men were all he was left with in terms of friends, it wouldn’t do to alienate them. Even if he felt as alien in their world as an Indian elephant tamer in the Amazon.
“I’m mostly sorry that I’ve been unable to find justice for you,” he said, turning to Fergus.
“Yes,” Fergus said, leaning back in his chair. “You haven’t found justice yet, but you will.”
The man’s faith in him was encouraging. “I know Denbigh was behind the attack,” Jack said, frustrated that all he had to go on was basics. “Everyone knows. But he covered his tracks well. He’s up to something else, though.”
“Oh?” Fergus sat straighter. They all did. “Who is the bastard planning to ruin next?”
Jack shrugged and shook his head. “I don’t know, but it’ll be more than sending a gang of toughs with sticks after someone.”
“Then find out what it is and stop him.”
Fergus’s charge was so simple and so exactly what Jack wanted to do that it made him prickle with restlessness. He should have been out in the field, following up on leads about explosives and Denbigh’s unusual activity, not sitting in a pretentious club, dressed in a restrictive suit that cost more than all of the clothes he’d ever owned combined, entertaining men who meant well but hadn’t worked a day in their lives, with the exception of ex-soldiers Fergus, Freddy, and Rupert.
“Enough of this talk of Denbigh and his crimes,” Rupert said in an overly-cheerful voice, slapping Jack on the back. “I brought my brother-in-law here to induct him into the finer pursuits of life. Let’s show him a good time.”
The sheen of tension that had hovered over the room broke as Rupert and his friends settled into what Jack assumed was
their regular routine. They drew an extra chair to the table, made way for Fergus, and launched into an explanation of the rules of some card game Jack had never heard of.
“There’s nothing to it, really,” Harrison said as he dealt the cards. “You’ll catch on in no time.”
Jack did not catch on. Card playing had always been associated with losing large sums of money in the most foolish way possible in his mind. The premise of the game seemed easy enough, but he lost more than he won in what Rupert called their “practice round”.
“A few more hands and you’ll pick it up,” he told Jack with an encouraging smile. Encouraging or perhaps condescending.
“Shall we up the stakes for this round?” John asked, taking a small wallet from his inside jacket pocket.
“No, thank you,” Jack said, pushing his chair back and standing.
“We don’t have to play for money,” Rupert rushed to say, a faint flush coming to his cheeks.
“Don’t worry, Clerkenwell. We’ll spot you the blunt if you didn’t bring your wallet,” Harrison grinned.
“I don’t know the game well enough,” Jack said in no uncertain terms, stepping back from the table.
“Fix yourself a drink and come stand over my shoulder to watch how it’s done,” Fergus said, mischief in his look.
Jack nodded, but it wasn’t agreement. He followed Fergus’s suggestion and moved to the table along one wall, where a variety of beverages were laid out. As the others continued with a new hand of cards, Jack fixed a cup of lukewarm tea from the mostly untouched silver teapot. He brought it back to the table and stood behind Fergus’s wheelchair, feeling as much of an outsider as he ever had as he watched the game.
“Reminds you of those long nights on watch in the Transvaal, doesn’t it?” Rupert asked with a grin for Fergus and Freddy.
“Without the constant fear of attack,” Freddy laughed.
“I don’t know about that. You still might be attacked,” Reese said, then laid several cards from his hand on the table.
The other men exclaimed with wordless delight and Reese looked pleased with himself.
“Don’t let him run away with the game,” Rupert said.
“It’ll be exactly like that night in Brentley’s Pub after those horrible exams in our second year,” John said.
The others laughed as though they knew exactly what John meant.
“I’m not going home with the brass monkey this time,” Freddy said in a mock serious voice.
“Whatever happened to that monkey anyhow?” Rupert chuckled.
“It’s still wedged in the tree, where he left it,” Harrison said, poking Freddy, who was seated next to him, with his elbow.
“Wedged somewhere else is more like it,” John said and elbowed Freddy from the other side.
The men all laughed and made a combination of rude and teasing sounds. Jack finished his tea, then stared at the loose, damp leaves left in the bottom of the cup. His collar was too tight. The blasted new shoes Lord Malcolm had forced on him pinched his feet and made him feel like he would slip and fall on his ass as he backed toward the beverage table again. He felt like a fool and a joke, from his pretentious haircut to the ridiculous silk socks he wore.
“At least he doesn’t have a stick up his arse, like someone else I know,” Fergus went on, playing his cards and glancing across the table to Rupert.
“I resent that remark,” Rupert said with mock offense.
“You should have seen the way he moralized to the entire regiment about the dangers of familiarity with the fairer sex down in Cape Town,” Fergus went on.
“I was in love,” Rupert defended himself as what seemed like exorbitant sums of money were placed on the table among the cards. “I still am in love. I wasn’t about to entertain those camp followers.”
“Yes, but you didn’t have to make the rest of us feel guilty for talking to them,” Freddy said with a laugh.
“Not everyone was just talking to them, like you did,” Rupert went on.
Jack set his teacup down and slipped quietly from the room. The swell of laughter that followed was all the proof he needed that the others hadn’t even noticed. It was all the proof he needed that he didn’t belong with them.
He strode purposefully down the hall, hands thrust in his pockets, as soon as he was certain Rupert and the rest wouldn’t come after him. Whoever had come up with the idea to admit him into a gentleman’s club was soft in the head at the least. He didn’t belong in marble halls, drinking expensive liquor and being offered premium cigars. He belonged on the streets of London, tucked in a corner booth at Danny Long’s pub, watching the depths of the underworld and waiting for a cock-up that would help him put dangerous criminals behind bars. Fergus was right. He should be reaching out to his contacts in London’s underbelly to find the information he needed to stop whatever Denbigh was planning, whether he was supposed to or not. He should—
“—have the explosives in place within the week.”
Jack stopped dead, backing up against the wall just shy of the doorway he’d been about to pass. Years of instinct honed in the most dangerous parts of London prompted him to hold his breath and open his ears.
“Explosives?” another man asked incredulously. “I say, Denbigh, isn’t that a bit much?”
A burst of energy gripped Jack’s chest and his heart sped up.
“Do you want to wrestle the party away from Gladstone and his idiots or not?” Denbigh snapped. Jack recognized the voice now that his name had been spoken.
“Of course,” a third man said, sending Jack’s heart racing harder. So at least three men were involved in the impending attack. “But we were expecting something more akin to the way you took out that Irish bastard.”
“Why take out one at a time when the entire field could be leveled in one go?” Denbigh asked in a vicious purr.
“This isn’t war, man,” the first of his friends said. “Besides, how do you propose to target just those men you wish to eliminate from the party and not a load of innocent bystanders?”
“There could be collateral damage,” Denbigh said. “But no one of any importance. My sister has made certain of that.”
Jack frowned. Lady Claudia? Her name hadn’t come up once in all of his investigations.
“Well, your sister had better do a damn good job of shielding those who need to stay out of this,” Denbigh’s second friend said. “I want those Home Rule fools eliminated, but I didn’t mean they should be killed, and I am loath to see innocent people caught up in the blast, so to speak.”
“Don’t worry,” Denbigh reassured them. By the sound of his voice and the shifting movements that went along with it, the men were headed for the door. “Brickman will have everything in place soon, and he knows exactly how to hone in on a target.”
Jack pushed away from the wall and ran away from the door as fast as he could. Several yards down the hall, he stopped abruptly, pivoted back toward the room, thrust his hands in his pockets again and lowered his head, and resumed walking toward the door, as if just approaching it instead of having listened in.
His ploy worked, and he crossed in front of the door just as Denbigh and two other men in fine suits left the room. He pretended not to see any of them, but that wasn’t enough to escape notice.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Denbigh said with a spiteful growl, turning toward Jack once he was in the hall. “Boy, you, boy!”
Jack glanced up, assuming Denbigh was speaking to him, only to find the man flagging down a liveried servant twice his age at the other end of the hall. The servant paused in his work and glanced questioningly at Denbigh.
“Don’t just stand there,” Denbigh ordered the man. “Someone’s let a wild dog loose in these hallowed halls. Call the pound at once.”
Denbigh’s friends snorted with laughter. The servant darted a look around, as if searching for an actual dog, then noticed Jack. “That is Lord Clerkenwell, my lord,” he told Denbigh with a deferential bow.
Jack swallowed his rage. Years of experience had taught him it was no bloody good brawling with a suspect before an investigation was complete. “Lord Denbigh,” he said with the sort of nod that one aristocrat gave another, then repeated it for Denbigh’s two friends.
He turned to march on, but Denbigh stopped him with, “Look at you, all jumped up in a fine suit. You look ridiculous, Craig.”
Jack paused, the urge to pummel the man to a pulp making his hands itch. He turned back to Denbigh long enough to say, “As you say, my lord.”
He walked on, but Denbigh and his lot weren’t through.
“Baron bloody Clerkenwell,” Denbigh snorted, shaking his head. “All because you had the audacity to soil and ruin one of our kind with your animalistic rutting.”
The effort it took for Jack to simply keep moving forward and away from the man had him shaking with rage.
“Of course, with a slut like Lady Bianca, I’m only surprised it wasn’t you and half the men in Limehouse.”
Jack froze, white-hot rage blurring the corners of his vision. He turned, so furious he could barely breathe, and glared at Denbigh so hard his two friends reeled back. With fists clenched at his sides, he stalked swiftly back down the hall to stand toe-to-toe with Denbigh, who held his ground but blanched all the same.
He wanted to throttle the man. He wanted to skin him alive and wrench out his filthy tongue with red-hot pliers. He wanted to slice open the bastard’s cock and peel it back inch by bloody inch so that he felt every modicum of pain possible.
Instead, he stood where he was, tall and silent, staring into Denbigh’s eyes without mercy, until he was certain the nob was on the verge of pissing himself. Then, in a calm, threatening voice, he said, “Your day is coming, Denbigh.”
That was all he needed to say or do. Anything else would have tipped the balance and made him look weak. So he took a step back, tugged at his jacket to straighten it, and pivoted away from Denbigh and his friends as though they weren’t worthy to lick the dust from his fancy new shoes.
It’s Only a Scandal if You’re Caught Page 17
