Authors: Elizabeth Essex
“I’m sorry.” Claire hiccuped her way back to some semblance of better self-control. “I don’t know what came over me. Truly, I am fine.”
But her mama was not nearly so sanguine. “Oh, my sweet girl. Oh, look at your face.” She cradled Claire’s jaw and turned her face to the light. Everything in the countess’s countenance spoke of concern.
Claire had to shut her eyes against the heartbroken pity on her mother’s face. “I’m fine, Mama.” Claire took her mother’s cold hand from her face. “I am so very, very sorry for all the worry I caused you.”
“Hush.” Claire could not tell if her mama was speaking to her or to her father, because Mama was wrapping her arms around Claire as if she were loath to let her go. “You don’t need to explain.”
“Unfortunately, she does,” her father insisted.
Claire wiped her eyes on the lawn handkerchief her mother passed her and sat up. “Yes. I feel that I must.”
Across the room the door opened, and Doggett showed the dowager duchess inside.
Claire immediately stood, as she had been taught as a child, in deference to the small, delicate woman’s age and stature.
“No, no.” The bird-like old woman gently waved Claire back. “Please don’t let me interrupt what is clearly a family reunion. But my girl”—she reached to take Claire’s hand between her own—“I am so relieved that you are returned to us. As I am sure is your mother.”
“Yes, Your Grace,” Mama assured her. “Thank you again for all your support.”
“Say nothing of it. It only matters that Claire is back, and safe and sound.”
“Yes.” Claire took the dear lady’s arthritic hand gratefully. “Thank you. And I am so very sorry for Maisy’s loss.”
The dowager and the countess looked from each other to her and back again. “Loss?” the duchess asked, her face white and drawn with dread.
There was nothing to do but tell the heavy truth. And tell it gently.
“Yes. I’m so sorry.” Claire felt again all the extraordinary inadequacy of her words, just as she had with Molly Carter. “Did you not know? Did no one tell you?”
“Tell us what?” The duchess’s hand had risen to her throat as if she were preparing herself for a blow.
And it would be a blow—the dowager no doubt saw Maisy a great deal more often than even her own mother. Claire held on to the dowager’s soft, gnarled hand. “That Maisy Carter’s body was found. We found her, last night, the Duke of Fenmore and I. That’s where we were. We recovered her from the river. But it was too late for Maisy. I’m so very sorry to have to tell you that Maisy Carter is dead.”
“No.” The duchess visibly wavered, and Claire was sure the delicate old woman might give way to a faint. Claire immediately put her arm around the dowager’s shoulders, to help her to a chair.
“No, no. I’m quite all right.” The dowager rallied. “But you, my poor girl. I can’t think of what you must have been through. We must think of you.”
“I’m fine, Your Grace,” Claire assured her. “Quite fine, for I had your grandson with me. His Grace of Fenmore was an extraordinary support and friend to me.”
“Fenmore? Your friend?” Her Grace’s tear-bright eyes and querulous repetition gave her all the appearance of a tiny owl.
“Yes, Your Grace,” Claire assured her.
“How extraordinary. I think we had best ring for some brandy, as I think I
will
now faint.”
Claire’s father moved to the bellpull, and Doggett appeared nearly instantly with the tea that Tanner—His Grace—had ordered earlier. “Brandy as well, please.”
“Yes, my lord.”
Mama passed the dowager a dish of restorative tea, and in another moment Papa felt the elderly woman was sufficiently recovered to hear the rest of it. “May I ask what you and His Grace were doing when you found this girl’s body?”
“Yes.” Claire tried to think of how best to couch what had happened, in a way that would be acceptable to him, while she returned to her chair. “We were conversing. Talking about my brothers, and shooting pistols. But then we found her. And we had to take her out of the river, and notify the authorities so they might do a postmortem. And notify her family as well—because I knew that is the sort of responsibility that a Jellicoe should take.” She wanted her father to know this. It was important to know that it hadn’t
all
been a lark. “And His Grace felt much the same way about the responsibility.”
“
We
? His Grace?” Her father’s weary eyes, blue and steady and unrelentingly kind, did not waver. “I did not think you were acquainted with His Grace of Fenmore.” He shook his head and looked up to the ceiling. “Your pardon, Your Grace, I did not think
anyone
was acquainted with the Duke of Fenmore.”
The dowager duchess waved away any implied insult. “I know, I know.”
“No. I wasn’t. We met last night. And one thing led quite naturally to another.” This time, it was Claire who took her mother’s hand. “I am very, very sorry to have caused you both so much worry. I did try to send a note. But it seems to have been mislaid. But I don’t know how I could have done otherwise.”
“Claire.” Her mother heaved a sigh so full of exasperation and frustration and parental love and relief that Claire felt as if she needed to hug
her
and tell
her
it was going to be all right. “You were out all night.”
“Yes,” she hedged. “But it was not as if I were alone. I had the Duke of Fenmore’s escort and assistance.”
“Claire,” her father repeated, and smoothed his hair, a gesture she knew was his way of showing that he was calm and in control when likely he felt neither. “You have a livid bruise across your face. However much you may want to cast the evening in an innocent light, there is something you are not telling us. And unfortunately, this situation has already erupted into a lurid scandal, even without the sad addition of the maid’s death. It was a scandal simply when you went missing. It will be a greater scandal when it is found that you seem to have gone with the Duke of Fenmore willingly. The Duke of Fenmore, whom nobody knows. Who doesn’t dance or speak at parties. Who doesn’t vote in the House of Lords. Just as much of a scandal as if Fenmore had carried you off as Lord Peter Rosing swore he had.”
“Lord Peter Rosing swore His Grace carried me off?” Claire was almost too astonished to do anything other than echo her father’s words. “Why, he did no such thing. Rosing was the one—” Any hurt she had felt at Fenmore’s sudden abandonment fell away under the hot press of indignant anger that rose within. “Lord Peter Rosing is a no-good liar. And worse.” She flung the words at her father as if he were the one to have made the charge.
But it was all too much—the brutal assault, the shocking murder, the long night, the head-spinning kiss, and the final humiliating abandonment. That awful mixture of worry and doubt and anger and shame came back with frightening speed, and she began to shake again—little tremors in her hands and legs—as if Lord Peter Rosing had assaulted her mere moments before and not more than twelve hours ago. As if Fenmore had not come to her rescue. As if the worst had actually happened.
And a voice in the back of her head whispered that it was her fault, that she should have known better, should have never danced or gone out into the dark night with Lord Peter Rosing. If she hadn’t said yes, he would never have been able to ruin her.
She felt ruined, even if the worst had not happened. She felt bereft without her Duke of Fenmore, His Grace of Tanner, at her side with all his cool, calm logic and sensible, unflinching advice. Without him, she felt abandoned and as powerless as she had felt when she had been pushed up against that wall.
No. Not again. Not ever again.
“Lord Peter Rosing tried to rape me.”
There. She had said it. Just the way His Grace would have—a fact clearly and forthrightly stated.
Everyone stopped—every movement, every conversation, every thought—and stared at her. Especially Mama, whose face held an expression not unlike that of His Grace the Duke of Fenmore when Claire first saw him, across the unconscious body of her assailant—fierce and deeply, deeply still.
“I will kill him,” her mother said.
It was rather a lovely thing, Mama’s focused, elegant fierceness. In her Claire could recognize that it was love. “But he did not succeed, Mama. His Grace of Fenmore intervened, and carried Rosing off me. The worst did not happen.”
There was another long silence—of overwhelming relief. Mama was again the first to speak. She turned to Claire’s father and said in a voice that was as strong and unforgiving as she had ever heard, “I told you so.”
Papa’s face was like flint.
“Thank God, Fenmore was there.” The duchess was still pressing her hand to the hollow of her throat, but she rallied again to cover the horrible silence that had descended. “But that’s just the sort of thing he would do, appear in a crisis.”
Yes. It was lovely to see that someone else also had faith in Tanner. It helped Claire believe that a man as vehement and clever as the Duke of Fenmore must have his reasons for leaving her without so much as a good-bye or any explanation to her father.
But she needed that calm vehemence of his that made everything so logical. She wanted him to explain that Lord Peter Rosing was an habitual rapist. That it wasn’t because she had been desperate enough to ignore the quiet warnings her mother had long ago whispered about Lord Peter. That it wasn’t because she was about to turn twenty years of age and was still unmarried while fresh-faced sixteen-year-olds she had shared her come-out with were now married and having their third child. That it wasn’t her fault.
But she very much feared that it was.
She swallowed over the acid burn of her shame. “Lord Peter Rosing was
not
telling the truth.”
“Lord Peter Rosing is
crippled,
” her father finally said. “And on his deathbed.”
“His Grace of Fenmore did nothing wrong,” Claire insisted. “He is an honorable man.”
Her father leaned back against his seat and regarded her—working furiously to control herself and hold back the tears that burned behind her eyes—for a long time before he spoke. “Be that as it may—”
“No.” Claire’s voice was a croak—her throat was hot and tight, aching with the effort not to cry. “Trustworthy. Loyal. And honorable. I know it.”
But she had nothing by which to prove it except her hopes.
“I see.” The Earl Sanderson regarded his daughter anew, as if he really were seeing her for the first time. “In that case, I shall wait with whatever patience I may have left for His Grace of Fenmore to call upon me.”
Chapter Nineteen
Tanner breathed a deep, satisfying lungful of air into his chest. He should have long ago given up listening at doors, but it was a useful, if filthy, habit and had served him well.
Claire had done it. She had told her parents what had happened. And she had defended him. It gave him a warm feeling in his middle that was suspiciously like happiness.
There was nothing for it then but to propose properly. And very carefully.
Some instinct beyond self-preservation—the guile that had served him for so long and so well—had made him abandon her. An instinct goaded by the thunderous, frightened rage etched into the earl’s face when he came through the door of Riverchon House. But whatever it was, it cautioned Tanner that the Earl Sanderson needed to be approached quietly and privately, without the pounding instability of the potent combination of anger and relief that had all but poured across his face at the sight of his daughter.
Such a man had to be met as an equal.
And so Tanner took the time to change into proper clothing, suitable to the honor of the occasion. Attired in the Duke of Fenmore’s ruthlessly elegant tailoring he was more than equal to cornering the Earl Sanderson in his grandmother’s magnificent two-story library. If his grandmother had one great pleasure and indulgence besides her gardens, it would have to be her books and the room she had built to house them. It took up an entire wing of the house, with a balcony that ringed its second floor.
Tanner knew the room well, for his bedchamber was above and connected to the library by a winding spiral stair. So it was on the balcony that he awaited the earl, utilizing all the symbolic advantage of descending from a height to meet his adversary.
The Earl Sanderson came into the room with a purposeful stride but said nothing in greeting as his gaze flicked over Tanner’s figure, silhouetted against the lighter backdrop of the window, a position Tanner had chosen quite purposefully to give him the advantage—the earl’s face would be well lit and easier to read, while his remained in shadow.
The earl didn’t close the door behind him but stood in the middle of the room, and contemplated Tanner with decided ill favor. “By rights, I ought to have you horsewhipped.”
Tanner descended slowly and stayed on the bottom step of the stair. Sanderson would have to look up to meet his eyes. But the man had a right to his anger. Tanner accepted that. But he was a man as well—a man with a savage pride.
Tanner kept his tone mild, conversational even. “You can try.”
Which only served to rile the man more. “I may yet see you taken up for a charge of murder.”
“To do so would be precipitous, as well as ill advised.” Riverchon was not Fenmore House and Doggett was not Beamish, but Tanner had his ways of finding things out. “Lord Peter Rosing lives yet.”
“Rosing can rot for all I care. I’m not talking about him—I’m talking about the maid. This is England, sir, and not even a duke is so above the law that he can murder a young woman.”
Ah. This was a charge he had not seen coming. He had assumed the charge against him would be based on some fact; he
had
assaulted Rosing, so he thought the charge must stem from that. But he was wrong.
“I did not murder Maisy Carter. I have spent a considerable portion of the past day and night trying to find out who did. So, if I may ask, who laid such a charge?”
He wanted more of the particulars from Sanderson’s own lips. But Tanner had already learned something valuable—whoever had laid that charge
knew
that Maisy Carter had been killed. No one but Tanner and Claire and later Jinks, Jack Denman, and Molly Carter had known that the girl had died. And until that afternoon, no one but those five people knew that her body had even been found.