Authors: Elizabeth Essex
“Nothing more? You will recall I have turned down your other offers of an alliance before.”
“Perhaps now you will reconsider.”
“Perhaps not. As I told you, I am not at all interested in joining the financial conquest of Britain. I am no gambler.”
But Tanner had heard the well-chosen words—
financial conquest
—and pricked up his ears. Sanderson was talking of the gold aurei.
“And I will not gamble with my daughter’s portion either,” the earl was saying. “Or were you not interested in how much she will bring?”
“Don’t be daft.” Hadleigh moved closer to the earl to correct himself. “But do not imagine that I will need her money.”
“And does your son? He has gambling habits, or so I’m told.”
Hadleigh waved the suggestion aside. “As do most young men.”
“He has other habits as well. I hate to be the one
carrying tales,
but surely
you’ve
heard some of the things that are being said. Of vices and predilections and indecent needs far beyond the realm of decent gentlemen.”
Tanner felt himself smile in the dark. It was getting downright vicious down there, with all the veiled barbs flying about. Just the way he liked it.
“Wild oats, which are neither here nor there. He will be Hadleigh, for God’s sake. Family is destiny. The marquessate is too important to let his petty faults get in the way.”
Tanner had heard such tripe for years, ever since the first moment he had set foot at Eton. But he knew without a doubt that a man was only what he could make of himself. What he believed. The measure of a man was how he treated those who could do him no benefit. How he treated his fellow man when no one else but God was looking.
The Earl Sanderson apparently felt at least partially the same way. “It is very much here, Hadleigh. Very much. His
faults
are vices that are by no means petty. People
will
talk, even if it is in whispers.”
Hadleigh absorbed that blow and struck another. “Yes, they will talk. And they will talk about young ladies, and they will ruin their reputations with far more viciousness than they will talk about healthy young men who live in the world.
She
will not be forgiven so easily. I can start talk far beyond what I have already.”
Beside Tanner, Claire went absolutely, lividly still with hot rage. He could feel it singeing off her skin.
“So is that the real transaction here, Hadleigh? My daughter marries your son, or you will make it even more of your business to further sully her name?”
Hadleigh smiled like a wolf who thinks he has cornered his prey. “You put it so undiplomatically.”
“It is an undiplomatic offer, sir,” the earl said bluntly.
“Let us hope your answer is not undiplomatic.”
“My answer to this proposal is the same as to the last.”
Hadleigh stiffened, but his shoulders eased slightly when the earl went on.
“Your son will have to put his proposal to my daughter. And then we shall see if she will have him. But I don’t think I will want him as a son-in-law.”
“I will never have him.” Claire’s whisper was low and fierce. “Never. I want to go right now to Lambeth Palace and get a special license. I—”
Tanner pulled her back deeper into the shadows and spoke low into her ear. “You have nothing to fear. Your father said it was your choice. And it’s Doctors’ Commons for the special license. And I’ve already sent my man.”
The thought seemed to calm her. She nodded against his chest and relaxed the grip she had taken on his arm. “Yes.”
“Because, my lord”—Sanderson’s voice was as clear and sharp as a shard of glass—“I don’t in any way want to be connected to you.”
“Be careful where you make enemies, Sanderson. You ought to know I have power.”
“I have seen and felt your power, Hadleigh. And I want none of it. I want nothing to do with you, and what I have come to understand are counterfeited gold coins.”
Hadleigh was outraged, but his voice betrayed the first real glimpse of honest fear. “Who told you that? Come, man, I gave you the coin to authenticate.”
“One coin, Hadleigh, does not evidence of a hoard make. And it is a small world we live in. And people
will
talk. People in Mayfair talk to people in the City. And people in the City talk to people in St. Catherine’s Dock.”
The earl’s statement was met with livid, hostile silence. And then Hadleigh spoke in tones so low and so heated that Tanner had to strain to hear the words.
“I will bury you.”
The Earl Sanderson did not so much as flinch. He looked up to the very top of the ornate spiral staircase and looked Tanner straight in the eye. And answered Hadleigh. “You may try.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Tanner shut the door carefully, even after the two antagonists had gone. “Your father loves you. I just thought you should know that.”
“I do know that. But I thank you anyway.”
Claire wrapped her arms around him, and his brain went all but blank. She was soft and sweet and pliant beside him, and he wanted more than anything else in the world—more than being clever and more than finding justice—to kiss her.
He ached just looking at her. His body all but vibrated, as if he were a tuning fork that only she knew exactly how to strike. Her very presence sent bursts of unhelpful sensations careering through his brain, disrupting his thought processes, hindering his progress and abilities.
And he liked it. He liked her. She was his. At least for as long as she offered herself to him.
And offering she was. Her wide blue eyes were shining up at him. Looking at him in that soft, unfathomable way. She was exquisite. And never more so than now, when she was flushed and naturally beautiful, and unadorned with all the usual adornments.
There he was repeating words. It was illogical. It was atypical. He didn’t like it.
Oh, but he liked her. He couldn’t be in the same room, the same city, the same world as her and not want to be with her. Not want to kiss her.
And so he did. He framed her extraordinary face with his hands, brushing aside the strands of silken blond hair that had fallen loose from her pins, and kissed her. Long and slow and sweet. Taking his time. Feeling pleasure and ease and satisfaction seep all the way into his bones.
She was soft and smelled of gardenia in the hollows behind her ear, and he wanted to lick the sweetness of her skin. He wanted to consume her whole. He wanted to run his fingers through her extraordinary hair and scatter the pins to the ground and spread it out glistening gold against the linen on his bed.
But there were things that needed to be done. Dots that needed to be connected. Thoughts that needed to be organized, whirling around the cage of his brain. “Claire. Before you fall completely under the spell of my skill at kissing—”
“Oh, you’re not particularly skilled at kissing. I’ve had better.”
He was so disconcerted by that particular backhanded insult that he stopped kissing.
“But now that we’re not kissing anymore,” she said as if they had been drinking tea or eating biscuits or doing anything other than kissing, “I have something in particular that I want to tell you. It just came to me. I mean, I had another thing, and they are related, that I wanted to tell you as well. Indeed that is the whole reason I sought you out.”
He hadn’t cared or thought she needed a reason to search him out. He only cared that she had.
“But with all your insight, and talk of
seminal liquor
and
blood,
you made me entirely forget my point.”
“Which was?”
“This afternoon I talked with one of the maids, as you do.” She fluttered her hands in front of her in a gesture meant to intimate femaleish things. “You will not credit this—”
“Then why are you telling me”—he really did like this teasing her—“if you know I will not credit it?”
“Because it is a turn of phrase intended to make you sit up and listen attentively. So do shut up, stop gaping, and listen attentively for a moment, Tanner, because I think I have figured it all out.”
He was not exactly gaping at her—his mouth was closed, and he was far to clever a man to ever gape. So he nodded, very politely, and said, “Just so.”
“You were right about them being invisible—the servants. And it frightens them now to feel that they’ve been seen, that someone amongst them has been killed. But the girl I was talking to, Parker—Nancy Parker—said most of the guests never even notice when they are near. She said she was going up that servants’ staircase we were just examining, last night, when she heard someone coming down. And her being one of the lower servants, she pulled back into the passing alcove—and I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a passing alcove. But a man—a guest—passed by her going down. And he was carrying someone all wrapped up in a white ladies’ evening cloak. And now I see that it must have been Maisy’s body he was carrying down.”
Tanner was all attention now, the gears in his brain whirring and falling into place like well-oiled tumblers in a lock. “Yes.”
Clever, clever girl. She was just as alert and still and alive as he had ever seen her. And he had never admired her more. “Who do you think it would be?”
“Tell me it was Rosing.”
“I am afraid I must disappoint us both. It was not Rosing.”
The urge to smash his fist into the nearest wall rose like a rogue wave from within, nearly propelling him up and out the goddamned window. There seemed to be this insurmountable wall in his brain, between what he knew ought to have happened and the evidence from Maisy Carter’s own hand.
He had to find the way through the wall. He had to.
“Do you not want to know who it was?” Claire was staring at him, all wide, beseeching eyes in the moonlight.
“Yes,” he said, though his voice was resigned. It would be another Layham or Edwards. Or—God’s balls—her father. Let it be anybody but her father. “Tell me.”
“His father. The Marquess of Hadleigh.”
And there it was, a way straight over the wall.
* * *
“Ah.” His Grace of Tanner went entirely still, the moonlight streaming through the dormer windows illuminating his tousled head like a Renaissance saint’s halo. “Now I have to rethink everything.” He brought up his hands in a little steeple in front of his mouth and drummed his fingers against his lips as if it helped him to think.
She stilled his fingers. “Not everything. Just the part from that closet upstairs.” In her excitement, she gripped his fingers so hard, her own began to hurt. But he didn’t care. “The maid—Nancy Parker—said that she told Mrs. Dalgliesh what she had seen, because it didn’t seem right his being there, and the housekeeper said to keep her thoughts to herself, as it was only Lord Hadleigh taking home his mistress Lady Westmoreland, who had become ill from too much drink. Said she—that is, Nancy said Mrs. Dalgliesh said she knew it was Lady Westmoreland from her white evening cloak. But—and this is the damning bit—the housemaids saw Lady Westmoreland, who was supposed to have been taken ill, still in the ballroom dancing until the party broke up when Hadleigh found Rosing.” She was nearly out of breath from her tumbling narrative. “So it was Maisy. What do you think of that?”
“I think, Lady Claire Jellicoe, that you are one of the cleverest women I have ever had the good fortune to meet.”
“How clever you are to recognize that.” She gave him her absolute best version of her winsome smile.
It worked just as it ought, making him look at her with something more than admiration for her cleverness. “Why, you, Lady Claire Jellicoe, are a minx.”
“Oh, I do so hope I am.” She still smiled at him entirely pleased with this description. “And so are you. Or whatever the male equivalent is. Listening at doors as if you’re quite practiced in the art. Scandalous.”
“Absolutely. I’ll be a scandal and you can be the enigma. Beauty as well as intelligence. Which puts you beyond the reach of all mere mortals.”
She smiled at that. How could she not? It was a compliment for the ages. Especially since he sounded so charmingly aggravated admitting it. “It is a very good thing that you are not a mere mortal, but I thank you, Your Grace. I live to serve.”
That tease did not have the effect she wanted, but brought him up short. He reached out to put his hand overs hers where she still held his, as if he could pass some of his vehemence to her. But his words were soft kindness itself. “You should live to
be,
Claire. Live just to be your own, lovely self.”
He was being his own self, deep and blunt and profound. And most endearing. “But the truth is, Your Grace, that I am my best self when I am helping others. Rather poor-spirited of me, I might suppose, but quite, quite true. But helping others need not be onerous. I like helping you.”
He looked away for a moment, out the open window over the river, as if he were trying to avoid responding. But he could not be untrue to himself. He had to speak the truth. Even if it cost him. “I like when you help me.”
“Good. For I should very much like to continue to do so.”
His eyes came straight to her, that dark blue-green of the fathomless ocean. “Do you truly?”
“Do you know me so little still that you think I would lie about such a thing?”
“I think I know you well enough to think that you are generous to a fault and commit to things which you might regret later.”
“I have not regretted one instant of our time together.” Of this she was now sure. “Well, perhaps the circumstances of our first instant together. But not the second. Because if you had not come to me—and you did come to me, did you not? You came there, to the boathouse, for the direct purpose of saving me?”
“Yes.”
“Then I am glad for it. All of it. For I don’t think I should ever have met you, otherwise. I should never have had the courage to ask to be introduced. And that would have been the greatest loss of all, never having met you. All the trouble has been worth it to know you.”
“My God, Claire. That is the most generous speech I think I have ever heard anyone make. You have suffered terribly, and yet you choose to characterize and see the incident in a positive light. My God.” He ran his hands through his hair in a gesture of rumpled frustration. “Your father said it, and I know it is true—I am not worth such a price.”