The Lady Julia Grey Bundle (63 page)

“A buccaneer,” Father said harshly, “of the worst sort. He will think nothing of you, only himself and what serves his investigations.”

I relaxed my grip on the chair and blew out a sigh of frustration.

“This is not about me. This is about you, resenting the fact that you brought him here and he has acted as lord and master in your home,” I told him waspishly. “You thought you could put the bit between his teeth and guide him where you liked, and it nettles you that he cannot be mastered. He is not like your sons, Father. He doesn’t give a tuppence for your great house or your lofty titles. He
accepts you as an equal, but you will not do the same for him. You are a terrible snob, do you know that?”

Father’s lips went very thin. “I am no such thing.”

“Yes, you are.” I rose, smoothing my skirts. “You always taught us that we should value a man according to his merit, his competence. Do you know a man more competent than Brisbane?”

He said nothing, his mouth set mulishly.

“I thought so. You are behaving very badly, Father. Very badly indeed.”

I reached out and took up the little cache of Aunt Hermia’s jewels, pocketing the bundle. “That is why you would not let him take these. You simply wanted to prove you could impose your will. He would never do anything to harm this family, Father.”

Father lowered his head, peering peevishly at me over his spectacles. “I think I may know better than you what that man is capable of, child. There are depths there you cannot begin to plumb.”

I smiled maliciously. “I seem to remember a time when you thought a dalliance with him might be advisable. Have you changed your opinion of him so much then?”

He did not reply to that, and I knew better than to push him further.

“I shall take Grim with me for a bit of exercise,” I told him. If he heard me, he gave no sign of it. He simply reached for his snuffbox again and flicked it open as I left him to his thoughts.

I
found Sir Cedric in the smoking room, alone with his thoughts and a thoroughly vile cigar. He rose when I entered and made to crush it out, but I stopped him.

“You must not on my account. I do love a good cigar,” I told him with a smile. It was not entirely a lie. I did love the scent of Brisbane’s thin Spanish cigars. The aroma of them clung to his fingers and clothes, cloaking him in mystery and a bit of a glamoury, conjuring thoughts of smoky campfires and the sharp-blooded dances of Andalusia. Sir Cedric’s cigar, an enormous fat sausage of a thing, smelled of mould and old dog.

I took the chair opposite and he resumed his, watching
me with an appraising glance. Grim had wandered off in the direction of a rather fine bust of Caesar, quorking softly to himself.

“An interesting pet, my lady,” Sir Cedric commented.

“He is, rather. Some people find him too morbid, but I am very fond of him.” I sat a little forward in my chair, hands clasped on my lap, smiling at him winsomely. “Sir Cedric, I believe you must know by now we are an unconventional family. We observe society’s customs when it suits us, and cast them to the winds when it does not.”

“I had noticed,” he replied acidly. He flicked a bit of ash into a china dish at his elbow, and I noticed his mouth had settled into lines of discontent. As well they might, I thought. His beloved fiancée enmeshed in a terrible crime, his temper worn to the thinnest edge. He had not as yet been told of the attack upon Lucy and her sister, but I thought it would take very little to push him to the brink of violence. I realised, repressing a little shudder, that he might well have already done violence. I thought of poor Mr. Snow, lying broken and bloody on the floor of the chapel, and the memory of it stiffened my resolve. I would use whatever means I held at my disposal to unmask his murderer, even if it was the man before me.

And the strongest weapon in my arsenal was surprise. I pitched my voice low and gentle. “I am worried for Lucy, and it is this cousinly concern that prompts me to speak freely to you. She has confessed to a terrible crime, which I believe she did not commit. I will ask you, sir, if my
cousin is proved innocent, as I believe she must be, will you marry her still?”

His teeth ground together as he crushed out the glowing tip of the cigar, with rage or some other emotion I could not decide. He rose, looming over me in a fashion I could not help but find a little threatening.

“I cannot see that it is any business of yours. Your father ought to find you another husband, one who will mend your meddlesome ways.” He turned to go, and for what happened next I can only credit instinct. I reached out to him, laying a gentle hand on his sleeve, and when I spoke, it was with a kindliness I feigned.

“She has broken your heart, has she not?”

He paused, his entire body stiffening like a pointer’s. Then he collapsed into the chair with a groan, burying his face in his hands. It was some minutes before he dropped them, and when he did, I saw they shook a little.

“Did you hear the story of how we met, Lucy and me?” he began. I shook my head, concealing my surprise at the turn of events. Instead of being rather sternly lectured, it seemed I was to be treated to a story. “It was Ludlow’s doing. His side of the family put great stock in education, refinement. My father thought solely of money. We lived in the poorest slums, not because my father could not afford better, but because he would not spend a tuppence more than he must for anything. He was a grim, miserly man who lived by one creed—if it could not put a penny in his pocket, he cared nothing for it. But I was a smart lad, and when Father put me to work as a bootmaker’s appren
tice, I learned the trade faster than any other boy in East London. I could cut a sole as quick and pretty as you please, and not one of the other lads could touch me for the stitches I used to make, so small you would need a magnifying glass just to see them.”

Sir Cedric paused, his tawny eyes glazing slightly out of focus as he looked beyond me into his past. “One day the bootmaker’s son was sick abed, and he shouted to me to come and help him fit a gentleman who had called at the shop. I had never seen a person of quality before, not like that. He was straight as a ramrod, a spine of steel and a nose like a whippet’s. He looked down at me with that nose, and why not? I was scruffy and ill-fed. I slept with the beetles under the stairs, and I washed only when forced to it. But I forgot myself, my worn clothes and ill-kempt hair. I made so bold as to stare at the gentleman, and when he took a book from his pocket and began to read, it was like he was doing magic in front of my very eyes. I was eight years old and I had never seen anyone read a book, can you imagine that?”

I could not, but I knew to comment at this point might be disastrous. He was lost in his reminiscences, and I dared not call him back.

“The gentleman noticed my interest, my obsession, and as he left, he
gave me the book.
I have read a thousand books since, but not one of them ever taught me a word to describe the feeling I had in that moment.
Joy, euphoria, ecstasy,
they are pale and feeble ghosts of the word I want. I thought the feeling would consume me. I might have
gone up in a pillar of flame in that moment, and done so happily. The feeling lasted until I opened the book and realised I could not understand a letter of it,” he added with a wry smile. “But I did not let that stop me. I begged the bootmaker’s daughter to teach me my letters, and she did,
a
to
zed,
right the way through, and by the end of that autumn, I could read the first line of the book the gentleman had given me.
‘If music be the food of love, play on’.
”

“Twelfth Night!”
I exclaimed, forgetting myself. But Sir Cedric merely smiled indulgently.

“Indeed it was. I thought it was the most magical thing I had ever heard, a shipwreck, false identities, love that could not be satisfied. My contentment never waned, no matter how many times I read it. Until I went home on Christmas Day, and my father threw it into the fireplace and burnt it before my eyes.”

I drew in a sharp breath, expelling it slowly. Sir Cedric curled a lip in derision.

“Do not pity me, lady. He burnt it because he thought I had wasted my wages on it instead of handing them over as I ought. But I got my own back, I did,” he said, his eyes snapping with a hellish mischief. “I burnt his only suit of clothes. The house stank of charred cloth for weeks—as long as I carried bruises on my back from the beating he gave me—but I did not care. He took ill that winter and was buried by Easter. I came home to live with my mother, and I promised her I would care for her. I did. By the time I was fourteen I had earned enough, coupled with what my father left us, to start my own business, selling cheap shoes
out of a cart for four times what they cost to make. They fell apart the first time they got wet, but no matter. By the time I was sixteen I had enough money to buy a pub. My mother signed the papers as I was not old enough, and I hired a rough-looking fellow to water the gin and look the other way when the doxies brought clients upstairs. Ah, you are shocked at that, I think. Not many know I made a tidy profit from the whores in Whitechapel, turning a blind eye to their doings, taking a share of their earnings in exchange for a private room and a bed. And with that profit, I bought my first factory, a textile mill in the Midlands, where I made my first millions on the backs of women and children.”

I did not speak. His story had clearly been told to offend me, and I refused to give him the satisfaction. I had thought him capable of real tenderness, but as he related the events of his youth, I began to doubt it.

“Now I owned copper mines and steamships, paper mills and even a small railway in Scotland. But still I lacked something. It was Ludlow who told me what it was. Civility, he said, education, polish. I had not read a book since the one my father burnt. No time for such foolishness, but Ludlow convinced me it was foolish not to. He said no lady of quality would marry a ruffian like me. So I hired a teacher of etiquette to smooth out my edges. I bought the entire library of a country house at auction and read every book in it. I attended plays and operas and exhibitions of the greatest paintings. And I went to lectures, everything from Darwin to the Dolomites, and it was at a lecture I met
Lucy. Your father spoke two hours that night, and I heard not a word of it. I could not take my eyes from her.”

Sir Cedric seemed to recollect my presence then. He slanted me a look from under his thick brows. “Doubtless you think me a fool, but I tell you I looked at her and I understood every poem I had ever read about love. It was that quick, that irrevocable. One minute, I was myself, as I had ever been. The next, I was consumed with her. I decided then that I must have her, and the rest you know. I wooed and won her in a fortnight. I care not for the particulars of how it happens. I left the planning of the wedding entirely to Lucy.” His features, so changeable and so reflective of his mood, altered then. His lips thinned, his brows drew together, and the colour of his complexion rose. “And now she has done this, ruined it all with her foolishness,” he said, spitting out the words as if they lay bitter on his tongue.

“Then you do not mean to marry her?” I ventured softly.

He raised his chin, curling his lip in scorn. “I made a promise to wed her and I am a man of my word. But do not think I am unaware of what it will mean. She has made us a laughingstock, figures of fun for all the world to jeer at. I shall be mocked for it, but I will marry her.”

And make her pay for it the rest of her life, I imagined. Poor Lucy. Whatever part she had played in the aftermath of the murder, she did not deserve Sir Cedric’s resentful affections. He did not appear to be a man who easily relinquished his grudges, and I felt certain Lucy would bear the lash of his grievances the whole of their marriage.

“I am sure there are those who will think it laudable you
stood beside her when she most needed your support,” I commented. Sir Cedric blasted me with a look.

“Surely you must understand what it means to be ridiculous in the eyes of society,” he said. “There is not a month goes by some fresh gossip about the Marches doesn’t find its way into the newspapers. I thought Lucy was far enough removed from that. She assured me after that business with your father—”

“My father? What of him?” To my knowledge, Father had been remarkably well-behaved of late. I had credited it to Hortense’s influence, but perhaps I had been too generous.

Sir Cedric shifted in his chair. He was the sort of man who liked always to be in the right, I suspected. If he knew something of Father’s exploits and had been instructed to keep his counsel, breaking that trust would put him squarely in the wrong. But I had not anticipated the streak of malice running like an ugly flaw through the fabric of his character.

“Your father was very nearly arrested a fortnight ago,” he told me, his eyes sharp with spite.

Thoughts spun past and I snatched at one. “The riot in Trafalgar Square?”

“That’s right. He went to support his friend, that treacherous Irish bastard.”

“You mean William O’Brien.” An Irish member of Parliament, he was at present languishing in prison, where his ill-treatment had been cause for the outrage in Trafalgar Square.

“I do indeed,” he spat.

“What happened?”

Sir Cedric shrugged. “March very nearly got shot for his troubles. If it had not been for that Brisbane fellow watching his back, your father would be lying next to Snow in the game larder.” He chuckled at his own joke and reached into his pocket for another vile cigar. I could not make sense of this. I had suspected Brisbane had been in Trafalgar Square on the fateful day and sustained his injury in the process. But that Father had been there as well was something I could not entirely take in.

“I am sorry, Sir Cedric, but I do not follow you. Do you mean to say that Lord Wargrave went to Trafalgar Square to protect my father?”

He clipped the end of his cigar, lit the tip, and pulled deeply from it, the end glowing like a ruby.

“I do not know how he came to be there. I only know that someone in that square fired a shot at your father, and
Wargrave,
” he said, spreading the title thickly with sarcasm, “stepped in front of the bullet. He and his man hurried your father out of the square before he was recognised, and them with a bullet wound and a broken leg between them.” He drew in a great lungful of smoke, then expelled it slowly through his nose. “If it were not for your friend, your father’s name would have been all over the newspapers, and he would have likely been accountable to Parliament for his treasonous actions.”

I bristled. “Father is no traitor. He merely has unconventional friends.”

Sir Cedric waved his cigar. “His friends are traitors, and as far as I am concerned, he is cut from the same cloth.”

“Then I must wonder that you are so willing to marry into his family,” I retorted.

Sir Cedric paused, puffing away at his cigar, clouding the atmosphere of the room with its poisonous aroma. Grim made a sound in his throat and rose to the top of the bust of Caesar where the air was clearer.

“I want the girl,” he said simply. “I want her, and what I want, I have. But she is soiled goods to me now, and I do not think I will ever look on her without thinking I have been got the better of.”

I stared at him, scarcely believing he was serious, but his countenance betrayed no sign of levity, and I knew he spoke the truth.

“Lucy is not responsible for the actions of her family,” I said, rising from my chair. He did not offer me the courtesy of rising as well, but merely sat, drawing deeply from his cigar and watching me with his tawny predator’s eyes. “Any more than we are responsible for her choice of husband,” I concluded with a fatuous smile.

I whistled for Grim and took my leave, my raven bobbing along in my wake. I had much to think on.