Authors: Elizabeth Essex
His Grace glanced briefly over his shoulder at poor Carter. “It is not currently evident. But we shall look for it when we examine the body.”
“We?” The air squeaked out of her lungs.
“There is a surgeon there in Chelsea, a friend of mine at the Royal Hospital, who can perform a postmortem. Don’t you see? We have to know.” His Grace seemed impatient with explanations—he shook his head as he answered—as if he thought she were deflecting him from his purpose. He immediately asked his own question: “What was her demeanor when she attended you? Was she dispirited in any way that you could see?”
Claire was too relieved not to be included in the “we” to take umbrage at his insistent tone, and she had rather think of anything besides the ominous-sounding postmortem. “Dispirited? No. I would say that she was warm, and attentive. She smiled, and complimented me. She said she was right pleased with the way I looked. Said she wished her young man—one of the footmen, she said—could see her looking like that. But she meant no harm—she was no more than she should be. I wouldn’t want you to think—” Claire wasn’t sure what she wanted the Duke of Fenmore to think about Maisy Carter. Or about her.
But there seemed to be no stopping the duke’s thinking. “So in the hours before her death she was not unhappy?”
“No. She was smiling in that soft way that girls have when—” Claire heard her own voice growing warm and ridiculous, and stopped herself. But she would not let the chilly and aloof Duke of Fenmore discompose or embarrass her. Not when she suspected he really was a very nice, kind man behind all the glower and off-putting questions. “The way they look when they are in love. Real love that’s reciprocated, and not a sham. It’s easier for other people, servants and the like, to find that. It’s different for people like…” She almost said “us.” “For a person like me. A person with family expectations.”
“Very different.” He nodded in understanding. “But the important thing is that young ladies who are not unhappy do not kill themselves on the spur of the moment by casting themselves into rivers. And even those who are unhappy, and have great reason to be unhappy, do not often do so.” His gaze founds hers in the glittering dark. “You didn’t.”
“No.” Her chin came up in agreement—instinct, she reckoned, or those hundreds of years of inherited Jellicoe pride—as an antidote to that unhappiness, the fear, that still skittered up and down her body like an ill wind. “I wouldn’t. And she doesn’t strike me as someone who would either.”
“No. You wouldn’t. Even though you were brutally assaulted, you never would have thought of killing yourself.” The conviction was back in his tone.
It was either disconcerting or strangely comforting to hear him speak so plainly and so surely of her—of thoughts to which he could not be privy. She was no saint. “No. Although I did think of killing Rosing. I wished I could. Only I had no means, or method.”
His smile was small and somehow understanding—a secret communication he shared with her, alone. “So did I—think of killing him. I
did
have the means. And any number of lethal methods. But I did not do so either. Because we are not animals, you and I.”
He made the statement with his usual blunt speed, but he looked at her very carefully. Hopefully. As if he were giving her some sort of examination she was not sure she was ready to pass.
She could only answer with the truth. “No. Not animals. We can choose.”
He had chosen to cripple Rosing, quite deliberately, he had said. And she had chosen to come with him, making herself complicit in that choice.
His Grace had been looking at her as they talked—indeed how could he not when he faced her not more than three feet away?—but his attention was fully upon her now. She could feel the weight of his focus press against her chest, like a physical thing. “So we can. And so can you. You can help me, Lady Claire Jellicoe. You can choose to come to Chelsea with me, and help me find who killed Maisy Carter.”
The skiff slid into the matte black shadow of Kew Bridge, poised above them, and a moment came again—the same feeling of breathless suspension, of the air inside her growing flat and still, just as it did before a summer storm. Just as it had in the moment before she had followed the Duke of Fenmore into the skiff. The moment she had chosen to put herself into his power.
For a little while, she had told herself then—a temporary solution. But she could not tell herself the same comforting lie, now. Chelsea was a long way ahead of them on the other side of Putney Bridge. Although the ball at Riverchon House could reliably be counted upon to go on through the wee small hours of the morning, she would have passed all that time alone, with the Duke of Fenmore—handsome, aloof, and appealingly vehement.
The truth was, she had already made her decision. Perhaps she really did have a penchant for the dangerous.
“Yes,” Claire said before she could let herself regret it, and slip back into wanting to be pampered and cosseted and buffered. “Yes. I will help you. Just as you helped me.”
“Pledged.” He said the word, and then rested both oars in one hand while he reached forward, offering his hand to shake. “Upon my honor, I do pledge it.”
Chapter Four
There wasn’t much between Richmond and Chelsea but twelve-odd miles of meandering water and dark, tree-lined banks. Lady Claire Jellicoe became quiet and watchful, so Tanner kept his own counsel, and used his breath and strength to propel the skiff silently onward. By the time they passed beneath the dark arched spans of Putney Bridge, his back and arms began to feel the strain of the long spell at the oars.
But his mind was still fresh—still ticking over each word that she had spoken, each action that she had chosen to make.
She had chosen to stay with him.
But ought he have made it more obvious that by choosing to stay with him, she was choosing him in another way? That she was choosing to stay with him for good—with him as her all but pledged husband? Indeed he had given her his pledge, as solemnly and reverently as if he had been standing at an altar.
When she spoke, her thoughts seemed more prosaic. “You row well.”
The observation startled him—he could not accustom himself to the feeling of being watched. But it was not unpleasant, her awareness of him. And it was only natural that she fall back upon the sort of social pleasantries and compliments at which she excelled.
“Thank you.” And it was a rare thing to be complimented with sincerity. In his role as Duke of Fenmore he had grown too used to obsequious flattery and empty compliments from those who sought to curry his favor. He had grown to distrust others’ opinions, though he could remember as a child an almost hunger for praise, first from his sister, and then from the captain, the man who would become her husband and Tanner’s brother-in-law.
In the years since those days, it seemed Tanner had grown hard as well as watchful.
So he tried to be something less hard, something more approachable and forthcoming, to this girl whom he meant to marry—or at least offer to marry—at the end of the night. “Took it up when I was at school. First at Eton. Then at Oxford.”
His savage pride would not permit him to tell her he had only taken up rowing at Eton because it was the one gentleman’s sport he could manage without wanting to break someone’s face. And the fact that he had been banned from other sports
for
breaking someone’s face. But it had suited him perfectly, the relentless drive and determination to outrow all the others. And hurtling himself backward at speed, not seeing where he was going, had seemed an apt metaphor for his changed life.
But there was something else behind her simple compliment. Something in the wistfulness he thought he heard in her voice. And in the fitful moonlight he could have sworn he saw something like the pinch of envy on her normally angelic face. Not envy of
him,
but … “Would you like to give it a try? I could teach you.”
Both her pleasure and her reticence were instantly palpable in her quick exhalation of breath and in the way she hesitated for a long moment before she overcame whatever qualms were holding her back. “Are you sure? It seems a little strange to— It seems a little strange with poor Carter there behind you.”
He gave Lady Claire an excuse: “I could use a rest. At least for a little while. Here.” He shifted over on the narrow thwart to give her room to sit adjacent to him. And in another moment she was seating herself carefully next to him. And he could feel the slight, febrile heat of her body all along his side in a way that made him feel strange and feverish and young again.
Young because the last time he could remember feeling so physically close to another person had been back when he and his sister had lived on their own, in cold rented rooms in one dingy part of the city or another—huddling together before bare hearths, and sleeping tumbled up like dogs to find some small measure of warmth and comfort.
But he was no longer twelve years old and Lady Claire Jellicoe was definitely not his sister. She was everything warm and everything comfortable in a way that was both discomfiting and remarkably easy. Her small, fine-boned shoulders seemed to fit just so against the curve of his biceps, and the delicate scent of her perfume filled his head like an opiate, rendering him young and eager and ridiculous, unable to govern either his mind or his body, which responded to her proximity with an almost-overwhelming confusion, as if he had been tumbled up by a wave.
But he was not Rosing, to let his brain be overcome by ungovernable desires. He was not an animal.
He
had learned what it was to be a gentleman.
But his gentleman-like mind did not seem to want to communicate the set of steps his clever brain had instantly sorted out. The instruction simply wouldn’t come, so he settled for saying only, “Watch me. Take the oar like so, and just follow my lead.”
She copied his motions easily, so in another moment he turned both oars over to her, and retreated to her seat so he could give himself both the relief of distance and the pleasure of watching her. Relief because he felt as if he were electrified, like the people at demonstrations of the Royal Philosophical Society electroscope machines, with their hair standing on end—all prickling awareness. And pleasure because she was naturally graceful, rowing smoothly; but she wasn’t used to the physical exertion, and soon had to rest her oars for a long moment.
For a quiet moment, they drifted along. Until she said, “You remind me of my brother.”
A scoffing huff escaped him. He didn’t want to to be compared to Lady Claire Jellicoe’s brother the viscount any more than he wanted to compare her to his sister.
But she surprised him again. “No. He’s quite wonderful, my brother Will. Quite out of the ordinary way of men, who never seem to want to let a woman do anything on her own.” Her face eased into a small, private smile. “And like you, he is a realist. He’s a ship’s captain.”
Tanner supplied the facts about her second brother without having to think. “Royal Navy. Decorated at Trafalgar and promoted to post captain last spring in consequence of the renewed threat of Napoléon’s return to power, as well as meritorious conduct in several sundry victories. Received more recent acclaim for victory in the Gulf of Guinea action against slavers off St. Matthew.” His mind was still occupied with the other part of what she said—the part about him letting her do things on her own.
“Fancy you should know all that.”
He didn’t want to appear to be keeping track of her and her family, memorizing details that were none of his business. Like the fact that she was born on a Monday—as fair of face as the folk rhyme would have it. So he supplied an excuse. “I read the newspapers.”
“So do I.” And then she amended, “After James—he’s my other brother, Viscount Jeffrey. Do you know him? After he reads them first, and makes sure there’s nothing in there about Will being dead, or maimed, or something else equally horrible.”
He saw her discomfort in the hunching of her shoulders inside his oversize coat, and he heard the quiet fear that lived inside her obvious love for her family.
It nearly shocked him, to see the burden of worry settle over her. He had gotten too used to imagining her as his ideal—perfect and untouched by the same cares as the rest of the writhing world. But she wasn’t immune to such care. She had grown up in a country that had been at war all her life. And she’d had a much-loved brother who had been actively engaged in that war throughout much of her childhood.
While Tanner had only been at war with the world, in one way or another, almost every day of his life. “I understand,” was all he could say.
“Do you?” She was looking at him again, her eyes searching through the night.
“When I was a lad I served a very short and not entirely successful term in His Majesty’s Royal Navy myself. I know my sister worried for me, the way you must do for your brother.”
“Yes. Did you? A duke sent to sea?” She shook her head again. “How irregular. Did you run away then, to go to sea?”
“No.” The idea was laughable. His whole youth had been spent as a sort of a runaway, but his stint in the navy had been an instance of running
toward
something for once. “I wasn’t always a duke.”
Lady Claire Jellicoe let out her own huff of patent disbelief. “Nonsense. Even if you were not yet the duke, you were the heir. The heir hardly ever gets to choose a military career nowadays.”
“I didn’t know I was the heir. My father had been estranged from his family.” He parceled out his history in small bites, waiting for her moment of enlightenment. It had been over fifteen years since the Fenmore scandal had been the talk of the
ton.
But she did not say, “Oh, yes, of course.” She still frowned at him. “What do you mean, ‘estranged’?”
“My father rejected the dukedom. He left his father, and all his claim to Fenmore for the church, and made a different kind of life. He made a new family, with my mother. And us. But then my father and mother died, and we were orphaned—my sister and I—and left on our own. In London. Without a real home. Without any money. We lived like beggars in the streets.” The memories of those days were growing hazier now with every passing, well-fed day, though he worked assiduously to remember. To never forget.