Authors: Elizabeth Essex
Jack stared at him. “And so?”
“So, don’t you see? She never would have put valuable earbobs in her right pocket. She knew it had a hole.”
“So?” Jack’s voice had risen with frustrated aggravation.
“She didn’t put the earbob there. Someone else did. But why? Why?” His brain immediately supplied two very plausible answers. “To make it look like she had stolen them. But we know she could not have stolen them, because she never would have put them in a pocket with a hole in it. And who would steal just one of a pair?”
His hands were already examining the hems of Maisy Carter’s now-dry skirts, feeling all the way around the edge. When he didn’t find what he was looking for, he put aside the skirt to examine the thicker cotton petticoat, running his hand down the length of the fabric, feeling for any anomalies, any bumps or unexpected knots in the material, until—
“Hello.” Tanner turned the quilted skirt of the maid’s petticoat over and turned back the flat seam where it had been pressed apart, to reveal the mate to the aquamarine earbob, hooked on a stitch. “And there’s the pair.”
“But what does having a pair mean?” Jack was leaning forward, curious and aggravated at himself for not seeing what to Tanner was so obvious.
“It means that someone—and I can only assume it is our murderer—placed these earbobs in her pocket as some sort of diversion.”
“A diversion from what?”
“From the true nature of the crime. From the murder. If all he did to her was murder?”
Jack looked at Tanner in his sharp, incisive way. “You frighten me sometimes with the way your mind works, you know that?”
Tanner was too impatient to be insulted or even concerned. He knew his mind worked in ways that other people thought strange. It was why he was cleverer. “Just tell me if she was only strangled.”
“You are right, damn you. She was raped. Quite forcibly. From behind, I should think. The pattern of bruising…” Jack simply shook his head. “I’ve never seen the like of it on a deceased’s body before.”
But Tanner felt the blow ring through him like a bell, clear and resonant. “Fuck all.”
Jack took a weary breath. “Well, that’s one way of putting it.”
“No. I—” He thought not to say it. He didn’t have the right to tell anyone if she did not want him to. But she had already told her parents and his grandmother—and he could only pray that the belligerent Earl Sanderson would have the moral fiber to do the right thing with that information. Because if a man of the Earl Sanderson’s reputation and power and authority—a man whose position was unassailable—spoke against the rapist perhaps, perhaps, something might at last be done about Lord Peter Rosing.
But Tanner was getting ahead of himself.
And Jack was catching up. “He also used a ligature of some kind to choke her, possibly during the rape. There is a deep but narrow line of a bruise in a perfect semi-circle just above the collarbone which is different from the marks from the hands that crushed her windpipe.”
“Her necklace—a cross upon a chain. He would have grabbed it from behind.” Tanner could see it in his mind’s eye as if it were happening in front of him. “Fisted it tight to control her, or even make her black out.” And he could still see Rosing’s hand clamped across Lady Claire Jellicoe’s mouth. See her china blue eyes wide and dark with panicked fright.
He should have killed Rosing when he had the chance.
Jack squinted into the air to contemplate the possibility. “Seems about right.” His detachment pulled Tanner back out of his rage, back to the facts that would help him put the bastard Rosing away.
“And how,” Jack was asking, “if I may be bold enough to ask, does your Lady Claire Jellicoe fit into all of this? And don’t bother to tell me ‘coincidence’—I know you don’t believe in it either.”
“She’s not my Lady Claire.” Not yet. Not if he weren’t very, very careful and very, very clever. And very circumspect. The lady’s story was hers to tell.
But if there were one man in all of England he could trust, it would be Jack. “I stopped a man from raping Lady Claire. From behind. Shoved up against a rough brick wall with a bloody glove stuffed into her mouth. Last night at Richmond.”
Jack let out a long, low whistle. “Two girls, one rape and murder, followed by an attempted rape? All in Richmond? That is … disturbing. Too damn disturbing to be coincidental, don’t you think?”
“That is exactly what I think. I believe the two are connected.”
“I believe in science and facts. Does either the science or the facts prove the two are connected, or even who did this?”
“The facts are yet unfolding. And here is one fact—the girl Maisy Carter was clutching this piece of fabric.” Tanner fetched the delicate scrap wrapped in a twist of paper out of the leather pouch still secreted around his neck. “And what’s more, she also held this coin. It was in the form of a fob—the kind of fob such as only an aristocrat or a monied member of society would wear. Not a laborer or a footman. Or me. The fob held a Roman coin—which, I have come to find, is a fake. A modern counterfeit made to look like an ancient Roman coin.”
Jack fetched a hand lens out of his waistcoat to examine first the fabric and then the fob. “But then—correct me if I am wrong and my logic is faulty—if she took this from the man who killed her…” He looked at Tanner in question.
“Or the man who raped her, assuming they were one and the same. She was clutching it in her hand. There were threads of the same fabric caught in her broken fingernails—yes?”
“Yes. So whoever she took it from was in front of her, not behind. They could not belong to the man who assaulted her.”
Tanner gave it only momentary thought. “Not necessarily. He could have tired of her fighting, and manhandled her around.” That was exactly what Rosing had done to Lady Claire to shove her face-first into the boathouse wall. “I saw him do just that—manhandle a girl against a wall—to Lady Claire Jellicoe. And I know for a fact that he’s done it before—raped girls—the man who tried to rape Lady Claire.”
Jack looked at him over the top of his eyeglasses. “A habituated rapist? Are you going to tell me his name?”
“Rosing. Lord Peter. Heir of—”
“The Marquess of Hadleigh.” Jack let out another long, low whistle.
“Ought to be hanged.” Tanner did not bother to keep the vehemence, the bone-deep loathing, from his voice.
“My sentiments exactly. But you can’t hang a man just for being a bastard.” Jack rocked back against his chair. “Christ, Tanner, but you can pick them. Rosing is a thoroughgoing bastard—speaking in terms of character, not lineage, although his father is a bastard of the same stripe if you ask me.”
“I do ask you. What do you know of either of them?”
“Knew Rosing at Oxford. You had taken your degree by then,” Jack said to Tanner. “But Rosing was sent down. Had been several times from what I recall. But I didn’t pay much attention. Good riddance, was all I thought.”
So Rosing had been a problem for years. Getting sent down from university was a common enough occurrence—half the spoiled young bucks of London through it a rite of passage to get sent down—
Another thought intruded. Rite of passage. Ritual.
“Did you find any other marks on the body? Marks that could not be explained by the violent manner of her death? Anything strange or out of place that struck you?”
“Good God, Tanner. Everything about the death of an innocent young girl strikes me as strange, and out of place, and tragic as all hell. And it should strike you, too, you cool bastard.” Jack’s self-control was fraying around the edges.
Tanner brushed aside the implied slight. He knew that Jack meant nothing by it. And if he was as cold and aloof as people said he was, then so much the better. It was a sacrifice he gladly made to keep his mind keen and functioning more clearly than anyone else’s. It was what made him cleverer. Clever enough to catch a murderer.
“Something different,” he explained to Jack. “Some mark, or token, or sign that only you or I would see. Though I couldn’t, though I looked. Think, man, something amiss. Eyelashes pulled out, or a fingernail, or a cut-off finger. Something—”
“Her hair. At the top of her nape, there was a hank of close-cropped hair.” Jack pulled his notebook into his lap to find the remark. “A little bristle. I felt it when I examined her skull for fracture.”
Clear, cold rage poured through Tanner like water over a fall, plummeting into him. This he had seen before. The words of the housemaid at Lowington House—the first time he had witnessed Lord Peter Rosing raping someone. Tanner hadn’t interfered, much to his shame. But he heard her words now, the maid, Suzannah Miller.
Cut my hair he did, sir. With a little knife. As if the other weren’t enough. He cut my hair.
“It was Rosing. He’ll have it. A trophy of his deed. A reminder of his sexual triumph. He may even take it out, and pleasure himself all over again while looking at it, reveling in the memory.”
“Tanner.” Jack’s tone held both horror and alarm—alarm at the vehemence of his own tone. “That’s one hell of an accusation to make against a peer.”
“And I will prove it—I
must
—that he is the one who raped Maisy Carter, and then tried to rape Lady Claire Jellicoe, or he will go on raping and killing with impunity.”
Tanner’s cold, calculating rage pushed him into action, and he couldn’t stand still. He began to pace back and forth across the chamber, with his fingers drumming against his mouth, the rhythm both calming and stimulating his brain as he thought out loud. “Rosing comes to the ball uninvited. As does his father, the Marquess of Hadleigh. Whose mistress, Lady Westmoreland, has a villa at Richmond, and a very passing acquaintance with my grandmother. Hadleigh must have been staying with Lady Westmoreland—perhaps she mentioned the ball—when he decided to invite himself. What butler would turn away a marquess? And he—the marquess—must have brought with him, not only his mistress, but also his bloody bastard of a son. Who rapes or attempts to rape two girls. But did he kill her? That’s where my logic and the evidence part ways.” The frustration was like a dull throb of pain at the back of his brain. “And if he didn’t, why not? He—”
“Something else occurs to me, Tanner.”
But Tanner had his metaphorical canvas spread before the wind and was sailing now. “I need to find how Rosing came across Maisy Carter—for I imagine that is exactly what he did; he’s an opportunistic bastard, rather than a plotter and planner. He’ll have simply prowled the less-populated hallways, trolling for a stray maid. That’s what he’d have done. And—”
“Tanner.” Jack broke in more emphatically.
“Yes?” He looked at Jack but didn’t pause in his pacing. The rhythm helped him think, helped him see what he needed to see.
“I’m actually surprised you didn’t bring it up.” Jack’s voice had changed tone—gone all careful and deadly quiet. “But it occurs to me how similar they are in appearance.”
“Lord Peter Rosing and his father?”
“No, Tanner.” Jack shook his head and closed his eyes, and Tanner could hear the carefulness in his friend’s voice for what it really was—dawning horror. “Both petite. Both blond, and both blue-eyed. The maid Maisy Carter and your Lady Claire Jellicoe.”
Chapter Twenty
After a long and gloriously hot bath, during which she scrubbed herself pink and listened very sympathetically and very, very attentively to the young maid’s nervous chatter, Claire was summoned back to her parents, who, she was told, awaited her in her mother’s silken sitting room.
Claire took the trouble and pleasure of dressing herself for the encounter first.
Herself
being the salient word—she didn’t have the heart to ring for assistance. And it only seemed fitting that she dress herself in white muslin and arrange her hair in a simple style before she went to her hard reckoning in her mother’s softly upholstered room.
Her father looked unhappy and primed for a fight. He did not disappoint but got straight to his point. “The Duke of Fenmore has offered for you, Claire. He said he was ‘compelled to.’” Her father’s tone was clearly one of distaste.
“Compelled?” That could be both good and bad. “In what way?”
Her father was brusque. “I did not ask, and he did not offer any explanation.”
Claire looked to her mother for assistance, but the countess shook her head. So Claire tried another approach. “And what did you say?”
“Nothing.” Her father paced before the empty fireplace. Evening approached, but in the long summer twilight only one lamp was lit for light. “Because I needed to speak to you first. And because your mother and I find ourselves at odds on the issue of Fenmore.”
Claire looked back to her mother, who nodded encouragingly and explained herself. “I feel that you are old enough, and rational enough, despite what has happened, to make up your own mind. If you feel His Grace will suit, then I have no objection to an engagement, during which period the turbulent emotions of the past few days will fade and you may consider the matter more rationally still. And it will serve to quash the rumors.”
“Despite?” But her parents were looking at her in expectation of an answer. “I—” Suddenly, despite the fact that she had thought about it—thought about him—and known, and hoped, a betrothal was coming, Claire felt as if the air were being squeezed out of her lungs.
She had never in her life gone against her parents’ advice or approval.
And she had known Tanner only one long, exciting, calamitous day.
“He is rich. You will never want for material things.” Her father’s tone was emphatic. And unhappy.
“Why don’t you like him, Papa?”
“I thought he had dishonorable intentions. I thought he had taken deeply dishonorable actions. And even if both you and he tell me his actions were honorable—that it was Lord Peter Rosing who acted so horribly dishonorably—it was still wrong of him to take you away, and keep you away for so long.”
“But we had to, Papa, because of Maisy Carter.”
“No.” Her father made a slashing motion with his hand to cut off her argument. “He never should have involved you in that. Never. He should have seen you back to your mother’s care immediately. His actions were not those of a gentleman, much less a peer of such rank as a duke.”