Bombshell

by Sarah MacLean

  He should leave her there. Leave her in the darkness to find her way back inside, or back home, or wherever it was Valkyries went to when they were done with their battles.

  He should walk away from that woman who had been a danger to him from the moment he met her.

  He certainly shouldn’t ask her, “And why is that?”

  But he did, and then he watched her full, red lips curve before she turned to reply, the pure, unadulterated satisfaction in her eyes a punch to the gut. “Haven’t you noticed, American? I am trouble.”

  Chapter Three

  The Place

  Covent Garden

  Three Nights Later

  There weren’t many locations in London where a known scandal could drink and socialize unnoticed, but The Place, tucked deep in Covent Garden and accessible only to those who knew the tangled web of streets between Bedford Street and St. Martin’s Lane, was one of them.

  Which made the pub Sesily’s favorite haunt.

  Yes, there were several casinos that received women (one that was women-exclusive), a handful of pubs where women were protected (including the one owned by her sister), and 72 Shelton Street—a ladies’ club that threw some of London’s best parties and specialized in women’s pleasure of all kinds. While discretion was guaranteed at every one of those places, however, those who frequented them were often there to be seen. In the rare instance that they weren’t looking to be recognized, no one could escape it—and recognition made things complicated.

  Doubly so when you might be overheard discussing the destruction of society’s worst.

  The Place wasn’t for being seen. It was for living. For drinking and dancing and laughing and being welcomed without hesitation.

  The kind of place that felt like home to someone who spent her days under the stern censure of society. The kind of place that would tell society precisely what it could do with its censure . . . if only society could find it. Which it couldn’t.

  The perfect haunt for four women who made it their work to bend the rules society and the world insisted they follow, and who did all in support of anyone who wished to do the same.

  No one at the place cared that Sesily was a scandal, or that Adelaide was a wallflower, or that Imogen was odd, or that the duchess lived her life as though she’d never been married in the first place. And because of that, the foursome made it their haunt.

  “I heard from Miss Fenwick this morning,” the Duchess of Trevescan said as Sesily slid into the chair next to her at the table in a back rear corner of the large central room of the pub—one of the only spots in The Place that wasn’t aglow with lamplight refracted through brightly colored glass and filled with a riot of laughter and good-natured shouts and raucous music that would soon tempt half those assembled to dancing.

  “Happy with our work, I hope?” Sesily said, blowing quick kisses across the table to Imogen and Adelaide. She smiled up at the barman who appeared at her elbow. “Good evening, Geoffrey.”

  “Whiskey tonight, luv?” He winked and Sesily imagined for a moment that she might find him handsome in another place, at another time.

  Four nights ago. A year ago. Two.

  She nodded. “I’m a crashing bore, I know.”

  “Impossible,” he replied, and was off to fetch her drink.

  Adelaide blinked from behind her enormous spectacles. “How is it that we waited three quarters of an hour to be noticed, and you arrive at the height of the evening and receive attention in mere seconds?”

  “My ineffable charm,” Sesily said with a grin as she reached across the table and snatched a roasted carrot from Adelaide’s plate.

  “That, and half of London wants to swiv you,” Imogen pointed out.

  “Only half?” Sesily retorted, removing her cloak. “You wound me.”

  “With that dress, perhaps more than half.”

  Sesily looked down at the wine red silk, brand new and cut low and tight enough to display ample breasts. When she stood, it would flatter every swell and curve. As well it should. It had cost a small fortune.

  “You’re damned right more than half,” she quipped. She looked excellent.

  Imogen snorted, Adelaide shook her head with a laugh and returned her attention to her gossip rag, and the duchess drank her champagne as though she were at court, which Sesily imagined she was. In the two years Sesily had worked alongside her, the duchess had used her wide-reaching influence to solve scores of what she referred to simply as problems—many for the women in this room.

  Brutal husbands with heavy hands, fathers and brothers who treated daughters and sisters like chattel, business owners who mistreated their employees, brothel owners who didn’t respect their girls’ work, men who didn’t take kindly to the word no.

  Memory flashed—a long ago meeting at Trevescan House, when the duchess had invited Sesily to join her. Proposing a new kind of partnership. One for which Sesily was uniquely qualified. The reckless scandal, who was never taken seriously, and so could move about in full view of the wide world.

  Sesily could still feel the way her heart had pounded at the offer—to be part of something bigger than herself.

  To trod a new path that had led her here. To this table, three days after she’d given Tilly Fenwick freedom from a marriage that would have destroyed her . . . or worse.

  “What did Miss Fenwick have to say?”

  The duchess smiled and tipped her glass in Sesily’s direction. “Well, it began with effusive thanks.”

  Pride burst in Sesily’s breast. “The betrothal?”

  “It seems Mr. Fenwick has decided that there is little value in having a daughter who is a countess if everyone will call her Countess Rotter behind her back.”

  “To her face, at this point,” Sesily said. Society might not be able to remove the title from Totting, but they could eliminate its value for a generation or two.

  “And so poor Tilly lives to be married off another day,” Adelaide said from behind her newspaper.

  “Well, now that Tilly Fenwick has such a committed group of benefactors . . . her father may be required to think twice next time.”

  “Lucky girl,” Sesily offered, casually.

  It was the truth. While many of the motley, raucous crowd at The Place marveled at the duchess’s immense power and how she did her best to use it for good, far fewer recognized that she’d aligned herself with a far-reaching network of some of the most fearsome women in London . . . including the trio who joined her that night.

  Virtually no one knew that, and those who did would never tell.

  The quartet had come together in circumstances born of serendipity and necessity. The duchess had been looking for brilliant women who had little to fear from society, and she’d found them in Imogen, who came with an expertise in things both extremely useful and extremely dangerous; Adelaide, whose meek exterior made her a superior thief; and Sesily—scandalous Sesily—who had shocked society so many times that few even noticed when she disappeared from a ballroom, scoundrel in tow.

  Hadn’t she done just that three nights earlier? Left the ballroom, no one the wiser, under cover of scandal—invisible in it?

  Not invisible to everyone.

  Caleb had seen her.

  Caught her.

  Protected her.

  She drank, willing the thoughts away. Now wasn’t the time for the man and his ridiculous broad shoulders and his unreasonably handsome face and the way he kissed her like he’d been waiting his whole life to do it.

  He clearly hadn’t, or he wouldn’t have made a habit of leaving the country every time he saw her.

  She cleared her throat and returned to more important matters. “If you ask me, Lord Rotter received an absolute gift. He could have had it far worse. Frankly, I’d have preferred him to have it far worse.”

  “I offered to take care of the problem,” Imogen said. “You all told me, categorically, that he had to awaken.”

  The duchess gave a little snort of amusement. “He d
id have to awaken.”

  When Imogen did not reply, Adelaide lowered her paper. “You understand that, don’t you, Imogen?” In the silence that followed, Adelaide prompted, “Don’t you, Imogen?”

  “Yes of course,” Imogen said, finally, cantankerous.

  “Good.”

  Imogen crossed her arms in silent defiance as the barman returned with Sesily’s whiskey. She waited until he disappeared, flushed with pleasure at Sesily’s grateful smile, and then added, “I’m merely saying that if he hadn’t awakened—”

  “If he hadn’t awakened,” Sesily interjected, taking half a potato from Adelaide, “we’d have had a dead body to contend with.”

  “It’s not as though we don’t have ways of dealing with those,” Imogen said.

  “Well, I’m most certainly not going to ask what ways you have for dealing with those,” Sesily said, “but I’m certain that even if we had dealt with it, I’d be on a boat somewhere, running from Peel’s boys just to be safe.”

  Robert Peel’s Metropolitan Police made for a more formidable foe requiring more creative solutions to the problems the quartet agreed to solve. No, Scotland Yard most definitely would not take kindly to the death of an earl.

  But the earl wasn’t dead. He was worse, destroyed by the truth—the truth that had only ever been acknowledged in knowing looks shared between men, and quick about-faces by young women who had had the benefit of privilege and warning.

  The truth, which had been ignored, as long as he didn’t harm one of their own.

  They’d all known the truth about Totting, and not one of them had done anything to stop him, so Sesily, Adelaide, Imogen, and the duchess had done what the others would not. And Sesily didn’t mind in the slightest that it was by her own hand.

  Now, the whole of the aristocracy could finally turn its back on the Earl of Totting, full of cowardice, relief, and the sheer delight that came with watching the fall of power.

  “The Scandal Sheet is already reporting it—consumed with what it calls A Rotten End,” Adelaide said.

  “Of course they are calling it that. Ever on the nose,” Sesily said, toasting the duchess with her whiskey. “I wonder how they had that gossip so quickly?”

  “As it happens, the publisher was in attendance at the ball. Can you believe it? What luck,” the duchess replied with a laugh. “Now, the work is protecting the rest of the city from the bastard. It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world for him to fall into the wrong hands somewhere in the East End.”

  Adelaide looked up. “God knows there are plenty of wrong hands who’d be happy to catch him.”

  “And I’m the dangerous one,” Imogen said.

  “You enjoy setting things aflame.”

  “With chemicals,” Imogen retorted. “Not my own anger.”

  Adelaide smiled and gave a little, innocent shrug. “Really, Imogen. I don’t know what you’re on about.”

  Sesily couldn’t help her laugh. Adelaide might be considered tepid and meek by most of Mayfair . . . but she had a wicked sense of justice and a willingness to do anything to mete it out.

  “Well, either way, neither of your particular brands of justice shall be meted out,” the duchess said. “I have it on good authority that Totting has a number of debts coming due in the next few days from less than accommodating lenders. Bad luck, that.”

  The Duchess of Trevescan had a vast network of informants that spread from royal palaces to dockside taverns. She knew every noble scoundrel in London, and a fair number of the less-than-noble ones. Totting would need more than luck to escape the dark corners of London unscathed.

  “If the rotter wasn’t an absolute maggot, I’d feel sorry for him,” Sesily said.

  “The state of his person aside, everyone is wondering who could have done the damage to his reputation,” Adelaide said.

  “Would we call it a reputation?”

  “A half dozen names bandied about in this column alone.”

  “Oh?” Sesily said, casually, indicating her friend’s plate. “What is that, turbot? Are you going to finish it?”

  Adelaide snapped the paper down. “Would someone summon one of her adoring masses and get her fed?”

  The duchess waved a hand toward a passing barman. Once additional food was ordered, Adelaide said, “The most likely culprits appear to be a parliamentary rival—”

  “Please,” Sesily said. “Not one man in Lords has the nerve.”

  “—a bet-taker to whom he apparently owes a fair amount of money—”

  “Illogical. A bookmaker would have done worse to his face.”

  “But not to his title!” Imogen proclaimed happily.

  Sesily grinned with pride. “No. Certainly not.”

  Adelaide continued. “And an ex-lover who was apparently devastated by the loss of his companionship.”

  Sesily scoffed. “Well, that’s absolutely a suspect named by Totting himself, because anyone with half a brain can understand that no one would ever be devastated by the loss of that man’s verminous companionship.” When she’d found the earl in the labyrinth that night, he had been less than gentlemanly. She’d been lucky that he’d been willing to take the drink she’d proffered, so she hadn’t been required to free the blade sheathed beneath her skirts.

  Sesily and the others’ nocturnal activities aside, women of sense did not leave the house without a weapon. Not in London in 1838, at least. A queen on the throne had ensured that too many men had taken entire leave of their senses.

  “Careful, Sesily,” the duchess said, “you’re beginning to sound put out that your name isn’t on the list.”

  “You must admit there’s a distinct lack of creativity in it.”

  “I will admit no such thing as long as it’s keeping eyes off the true culprit, and ensuring that the truth shall be the best kept secret in London.”

  “I suppose that’s fine,” Sesily replied. “And so? What’s next, now that we’ve closed the book on Rotting?”

  “There’s a moneylender preying on widows in St. Giles,” Imogen said. “I wouldn’t mind seeing him the victim of bad luck.”

  “And Coleford,” Adelaide interjected, cool loathing in her voice as she invoked the viscount from the ball. “I am not ashamed to say I’m willing to do fairly anything to destroy him.”

  Rumor had it that Lord Coleford was using his position as a benefactor of the Foundling Hospital to help a pair of monstrous brothers take clothes from mothers’ backs with the promise of finding the children they’d long-ago surrendered to the orphanage.

  “It just so happens that I’ve something arranged for you on that front. I believe you’ll be receiving a dinner invitation from the new viscountess. I urge you to accept,” the duchess said, before adding to Sesily, “You, as well.”

  Sesily nodded, more than agreeable to whatever plan would bring down the awful man. “Any news on the raids?”

  In the last several months, there’d been a number of raids around London—gaming hells, taverns, pleasure clubs, and more, all with a common thread: they were largely owned and frequented by women.

  What had begun as a handful of brawls, a rough-up here and there, had become more serious in the last few months. A secret, high-end brothel in Kensington, owned and operated by the women who worked it, had been burned to the ground. Even 72 Shelton Street—one of the best protected clubs in London—had been raided and wrecked, and was now in the process of being rebuilt. The same had happened to a nearby casino with a women-only membership.

  They were places where women held power. And wherever women held power, be it a throne, a club, or a labyrinth, there were men wishing to seize it.

  “Brutes are easy to hire,” said the duchess with a shake of her head, “but their heads grow back when they are severed from the body. Right now, the muscle appears to be The Bully Boys.”

  Sesily grimaced at the name—street thugs who hired themselves out to the highest bidder. “They’re not the money.”

  “No,” the
duchess agreed. “I expect there’s money from the House of Lords in the mix. No one likes the freedom a woman on the throne inspires—least of all the men who benefit from keeping women under their thumbs. We’re working on it.”

  Sesily groaned her frustration. The foursome had been tracing the source of the raids for months, and she was growing impatient for a proper lead on the identity of the men terrorizing the city.

  In the meantime, they busied themselves with men like Totting, who deserved his own punishment.

  “Sesily,” the duchess said, as though she could hear Sesily’s thoughts.

  She looked up. “Yes?”

  “It is only the four of us who know what happened in my gardens, is it not?”

  Sesily’s heart began to pound. The duchess was concerned about their identities being revealed. She drank, ignoring the thrum of memory that came with the question. Caleb Calhoun, tall and broad, putting himself between Sesily and danger.

  “Well. Us and Miss Fenwick.”

  Silence fell, punctuated by shouts and laughter beyond, somehow quieter than the sound of her friends’ gazes, rapt upon her.

  She looked away, toward the rest of the room. “Oh, there’s Maggie,” she said, brightly, knowing that it was a properly ridiculous observation. Of course there was Maggie.

  To be at The Place was to be with Maggie O’Tiernen, owner and proprietress—a Black woman who’d left Ireland for London the moment she was able to build a new life, where she could live freely and embody her authentic self. In doing so, she had built one of London’s most welcoming spaces. Whoever you were, whomever you loved, whatever your journey to yourself, there was a seat for all women at The Place.

  Sesily desperately attempted to catch the eye of the bold and boisterous Maggie, who would absolutely come to rescue her from the prying eyes of her companions—if she wasn’t busy recounting one of her delicious stories to a rapt audience.

  “Hang on, now.” Imogen had noticed something was off in the conversation, which meant something was very off in the conversation. “What’s happened?”

  “Tell us,” the duchess said, casually and not at all casually, helping herself to another glass of champagne. “How did you avoid discovery in my gardens?”