Authors: Elizabeth Essex
And left her glad at what a strange, strange, interesting duke His Grace of Fenmore was proving himself to be.
Chapter Eight
Tanner did not know how his feet carried him from the room, nor how he managed to close the door.
On such matters his mind was alarmingly blank.
Because it was full to bursting with other things—the entrancing way Lady Claire Jellicoe’s spine had curved down from her shoulders. The shadowed dip of skin behind her shift and stays. The astonishing elegance of her stays themselves—beautifully made with exquisite attention to detail.
It had been everything he could do to to keep himself from letting his fingers stray all the way down the long, elegant line of her spine. It had been everything to make himself speak like a gentleman. Everything to simply remember to breathe.
He did so now, taking a deep, deep breath—inhaling the memory of her warm perfume the same way he had inhaled the scent of her body from his coat as soon as he was safely behind the door of his chamber.
Orange blossom and rose. Exquisite.
And he was going to take this exquisite bloom of a young woman with him into hell.
He must have run utterly, hopelessly mad. Because he was filled with the same sort of excitement—a physical hum of readiness in his body—that he remembered as a boy, out stalking rich culls to dip with his sister. His professional acumen had remained—he could still spot a goldfinch at twenty paces—but he’d lost that jangle of excitement that used to grip him hard when his sister, Meggs, had tipped him the nod and set him after a mark.
The intervening years had left a different sort of mark. Hunger no longer hollowed out his belly—the dukedom had seen to feeding him up. But the plenty had left a different sort of fire in his belly. A fire he had never been able to slake. A fire that flared ever stronger in the presence of Lady Claire Jellicoe.
The need to prove himself worthy.
Tanner folded the evening coat Lady Claire had returned to him and set it carefully aside—an act of sentimentality he decried in himself, but was powerless to resist. He would likely never wear it again, nor surrender it ever to be laundered, because it still held the warmth of her body, her scent.
Would that it always could.
Yet he knew it would not. So Tanner took another scalding gulp of the coffee Jinks had finally delivered—as aromatic and as dark as the peat bog Jinks must have originally come from—and let the hot jolt of urgency set his blood to pumping, before he proceeded to change the rest of his clothing into what he thought of as his Seven Dials rig. He discarded his satin breeches for the rough buckskins and well-worn, heavy boots that were his usual companions when he ventured out into London’s meaner streets.
And mean they would be this morning. The meanest.
Which meant rechecking the gun he had retrieved from Lady Claire and adding another to his waistband, along with the knives in his boots.
He was as ready as he could be. He could only hope she was as well.
Tanner left his bedchamber to return to the kitchens, where Jack was recording his observations into a notebook in his careful, precise hand. “What have you got?”
The surgeon didn’t look up. “Death by strangulation, just as you supposed. Throttled her as effectively as if she’d been hanged. Choked off the blood flow in the jugular vein and carotid arteries first—evidenced most easily in the petichiae here in the whites of her eyes.”
“Pinprick dots of red. I see.” A new fact to tuck into the orderly file room of his mind.
“Yes. I was about to remove her clothing, but I wanted to make sure there would be no other viewers.” Jack gave him a rather particular look—a look that asked a different question from the one he had just voiced.
“You mean Lady Claire?”
“Yes, Lady Claire.” Jack tipped his chin to the side, always a sign that he was rampantly curious but too well mannered to blurt out his question.
Unlike Tanner, who countered his friend’s curiosity by bluntly concentrating on the practicalities. “Do you need to anatomize the girl to know what happened?”
“No.” The surgeon shook his head. “Not likely. The signs are clear that she was murdered.”
“But was she raped?”
“Ah.” Jack’s head went back slowly. “You wouldn’t ask unless you had good reason to suspect so stored up in that fiendishly clever brain of yours. Further examination will be necessary. Which will necessitate removal of the clothing. Which would be easiest to accomplish before the full rigor mortis sets in. Which brings us back to Lady Claire Jellicoe. And whether or not she is likely to reappear in this kitchen.”
“We’ll leave directly.”
“To take her home?”
“Later.”
“Later?” Jack’s look was cautiously probing—narrowed eyes under one raised brow, along with that characteristically questioning tip of the head. “How much later? And I have to ask, what on earth you were doing alone with Lady Claire Jellicoe in the first place?”
Tanner was not going to answer the question. He would not expose Lady Claire in that way. “We were not
doing
anything. I told you, Lady Claire identified the body as that of her servant Maisy Carter.”
“You do realize? Even
you
must realize what must occur if you’ve had that girl—
that
girl, the daughter of an earl—out on the river all these hours?”
“Even me? Careful, Jack.”
“Yes, even you. Tanner, you have to realize that there are some social conventions that are set in stone. Not even the silent, frosty Duke of Fenmore could hope to silence or endure such a scandal.”
“I can endure anything.”
“But can Lady Claire? Will she want to? Do you want her to?”
No. He did not want Lady Claire to suffer at all. That was how the night had begun. But he was saved from finding the answer by the arrival of Lady Claire herself, who stooped down to peer cautiously under the lintel as she came down the stairs. “Your Grace?”
“Yes, my lady?” he answered automatically. And in that moment he realized that he would do almost anything it seemed to make her his lady in actuality. Even take her to the Almonry.
He really did have a stupendously stupid amount of pride.
Lady Claire came down the last few steps, and stood at the bottom of the stairwell, awaiting his approval. She was dressed much as he, in worn dark clothes, sturdy fabrics, and heavy boots. But if he had thought the drabber dress his sister had left behind from her days of working the dub would have diminished and dulled Lady Claire’s beauty, he was wrong.
Even without silk and muslin, she was exquisite. And even more so because the dull, rough fabric of the gown made the fineness of her beauty stand out more starkly. She looked both the same, and entirely different—a younger, far less polished version of herself, from the days when she must have rambled over her father’s country estate, climbing trees and chasing after her brothers. She looked like a wild wood nymph from some ancient story, earthy and natural, and, dare he say it, free.
Free to come with him.
Her long, shining, golden hair was also freed from its pins, swirling loosely into a knot at her nape. The messy coil was an attractive nuisance—it was all he could do not to plunge his hands into the bright strands and disrupt the whole thing.
But his practical, organized mind reasserted itself. “You’ll want to wear a shawl to cover your bright hair. And to remove your earbobs. They’ll make a temping target, and I should hate to have your lobes ripped as a result.” He meant to scare her. He meant for her to completely understand what she was getting herself into. Her costly earbobs, jeweled with diamonds and pearls, were valuable enough to keep half of the Almonry’s residents in gin for a ten-year.
“Oh. My. No.” She quickly unpinned the jewels, and held them out to him in the palm of her hand.
“Did you find the pockets sewn into petticoats?” The jewels would be safe enough in Meggs’s deep pockets. His canny sister had hidden the entirety of their wealth there many a time.
“No. I kept my own chemise—” A swath of color swept across the lady’s cheeks. “No. Perhaps you might have a safe place for them here?”
“Yes. Of course.” Tanner had at least two caches hidden in the old walls, and he suspected that Jinks must have several more he could be made to divulge in a pinch.
“Thank you. And I have the note. To my parents.”
As she handed him the earbobs and the unsealed note, her fingers brushed against his palm, and Tanner was again reminded of how soft her skin was. She had the hands of a lady—hands that had never done any kind of manual labor or rough, uncomfortable work. Hands that would only find exercise in piano sonatas or embroidery work—fingers long and supple and fragile. She was a fine china teacup, suitable for taking life in manageable sips. Entirely unsuited to the education he was giving her now.
But she wanted more, she had said. She wanted to be competent and capable and self-determining in a new and different way.
“You’re welcome,” he said stupidly, because he no longer remembered what he was thanking her for. And he stood there awkwardly for another long moment, because he couldn’t seem to stop himself from looking at her, and marveling that he appeared to be living through a waking dream. A dream wherein everything he had ever fantasized about Lady Claire Jellicoe was coming true—she was with him, away from society, and looking at him with a sort of hopeful cheerfulness that told him she really was as mad as he.
“Are you ready?”
“Yes, I’m— No. I can’t lie.” She looked at him, her wide blue eyes open and guileless. “I must admit, I’m afraid.” She caught her lip between her teeth to quash her smile. “And excited, perhaps? But definitely afraid. But it will be all right, won’t it? You do know what you’re doing, don’t you?”
“I do. Come with me, and I’ll show you.”
Her glance went to the corridor to the kitchen door.
“Not yet. First, let us have a look at the clues the tenacious Miss Carter left us—the fob and the scrap of fabric.” He unhooked one of the lamps, and led her into the labyrinth of small rooms and offices off the kitchen, to the small room that used to house the laundry.
It was here that he kept his scientific instruments—the bright lime-washed walls reflected light, and helped illuminate the instruments at night, when he was most often in Chelsea. He pulled the felt cover off the beautifully made brass microscope, and moved the lamp closer to the reflecting mirror so he would have plenty of light.
Beneath magnification, the fabric revealed itself to be a creamy and glistening silk. Rich and enticing. But he resisted the lure, and moved aside to let Lady Claire take a look. “Have you used an optical instrument before? The image you’ll see is magnified—made larger—through a number of progressive lenses.” He also resisted the urge to lecture. She was a smart girl—she would figure it out.
Lady Claire moved to the eyepiece and copied his stance. “Oh, heavens. I can see—how marvelous.”
“Tell me what you see.”
“Ivory-colored twilled silk, with fine gold tissue woven in.”
“Yes. Exclusive and expensive fabric. The kind of fabric only a rich man could buy.”
“Yes. I see.”
“The kind of fabric only three or four tailors in the city of London would keep in stock. An old-fashioned fabric, used by an established, old-fashioned tailor, who had made their reputation on the elaborately brocaded and embroidered waistcoats of the previous era. That narrows it down to two—three at most.”
“And any of those tailors would likely be more than happy to furnish the lofty Duke of Fenmore with a list of their exclusive clients, don’t you think?”
“I do.” Oh, how he liked it when the hunt was afoot. But the rush of pleasure filling his chest surprised him. It went beyond that jangling excitement of the hunt. It went beyond anything he had heretofore experienced. It was almost … happiness. How extraordinary.
“Shall we visit them all?”
“No.” As much as he wanted to do just that, he knew couldn’t expose Lady Claire Jellicoe so publicly as to take her on a tour of
tonnish
tailors—she was too well known in society, and was like to be recognized. “I’ll send a man while we’re in the Almonry.” He would send Jinks to put Beamish, the majordomo nominally in charge of Fenmore House, on to the task. Beamish knew a thing or two about taking the lay of a ken. “We have other tasks to undertake.”
“All right. You know best.”
He did. But she not only looked at him—she also looked to him. She looked to him as if he could take away her fear, and fill the empty space it left with something easier.
But he had nothing. Nothing of finesse and grace. Nothing to ease her fears but his cleverness. Nothing but himself.
And Tanner found he was as selfish a creature as Rosing. Because he wanted to show her his cleverness. So he would take her by the hand and lead her into hell.
He said the only thing he knew that was true. “Trust me.”
She smiled. That small private smile that seemed as if it were only for him. As if he were everything important and trustworthy in her world. “I have,” she said. “And I will.”
He knew it for the gift it was. But he nodded, all confident brusqueness, and said, “Right then. Shall we go?”
He could see her fill her lungs with silent resolution. And then she gave him that quick, bright smile, full of wobbling Dutch courage. “Yes, please.”
He pocketed the fob, gave his instructions to Jinks, and led her out of the house. They went out the same way they had come—through the kitchen door and back down the alley—and headed back to the water stairs just as the first faint flush of dawn pinked a ribbon in the eastern sky. It was the best time to be up and about. All the dirty business of the wee small hours of the morning had long since been done, and villains and victims alike had quit the street to find their respective sanctuaries. Gone to ground like foxes to their dens.
The muddy funk of low tide rose off the water to greet them. The tide was almost full out, but the skiff was still in the water where he had left it at the far end of the plank way. After he had handed Lady Claire in, Tanner took a moment to search the shadows beneath the stairs for the urchin he had bargained with to keep it safe.