The Suffragette Scandal (The Brothers Sinister) (5 page)

“Excellent,” he said cheerily. “I’m not a trustworthy man. I’ve lied to you a half-dozen times over the course of this conversation, and I’ll no doubt do it again. For instance, the name I was born with is not Edward Clark—although I have used that name regularly for the last six years or so, and I think of it as mine now. By all means, Miss Marshall, don’t trust me. But do work with me. On this, our interests are aligned. You don’t want to be ruined, and I’d rather your enemy not ruin you either.”

“Why? You don’t give a damn about me.”

His smile didn’t slip, but it grew just a touch darker. “You’re right,” he said. “But as it turns out, my indifference to you is overbalanced by my dislike of him.”

Or—equally likely—he’d been tasked with charming her, learning her plans.

“No, thank you.” She smoothed her skirts over her lap and met his gaze directly. “I’ll take my chances on my own. I do not need help from a self-professed liar who might betray me at any moment.”

He sighed. “This would be far easier if you were less clever.” It sounded like a complaint, but he winked at her at the end. “Damn it, Miss Marshall, I’m trying to be a little honorable. But very well. Since I must.” He raised his eyes to her. “You need to work with me because I
will
betray you.”

She sucked her breath in. “Pardon?”

“How precarious is your position in society, Miss Marshall? You’re young, unmarried, and reasonably good-looking.” He said the last with no emotion, as if he were just reciting facts.

He was. She had to remember that. No matter how flirtatious his tone, that was all she meant to him: a collection of facts.

“I have two possible plans to foil my enemy. One is to work with you to defeat him. The other is to shut down your operations here so thoroughly that he doesn’t get the pleasure of doing it himself. A forged letter of credit sold to your enemy? A missive in your handwriting, written to a lover and indiscreetly left for someone else to find?” He shrugged. “It would take me half an afternoon to make your life utterly miserable and maybe a few days to make it impossible.”

Her heart had begun to thud in a low, heavy rhythm. Strange, how the system of nerves could so overtake the mind, that a man sitting before her and speaking in such an easy tone could make her feel as if she were a hare faced by a pack of wolves. He looked at her with a small smile on his face. It seemed as if he could hear her pulse, and its thready beat was music to his ears.

She wasn’t going to rabbit away. This was
her
business, her life, and she wasn’t about to let this man ruin it for her. She steepled her fingers, willing them not to tremble, and gave her best impression of a bored sigh. “So this is blackmail.”

The smile Mr. Clark gave her felt like a weapon—one that he’d chosen carefully from his massive arsenal. It was the smile of a man who knew that he could charm and devastate, and he employed it with the precision of a master. He leaned forward. “Miss Marshall, I believe you are mispronouncing that word.”

She looked over at him.

“You should pronounce it like this: ‘Huzzah! Blackmail!’”

Her eyebrows rose. “How extraordinary, Mr. Clark. I thought you didn’t use exclamation points.”

“I don’t.” He smiled at her. “But you do, and there’s no need to be parsimonious.”

“Huzzah.” Free met his gaze with a flat stare. “Crime! Right now, that crime is blackmail, but it won’t be blackmail much longer.”

“No? How do you figure?”

“With luck and a good quantity of arsenic…?” She gave him a smile of her own. “Soon it will be: ‘Huzzah! Murder!’ Now there’s a cause that deserves my exclamation points.”

She’d meant to confound him. Instead, his smile tilted, and all that calculated charm disappeared in a wash of real laughter. He leaned back in his chair, shaking his head. Somehow, it was even more unnerving to realize that he found her amusing. And entirely unfair that some small part of her wanted to make him laugh again.

She raised an eyebrow and regulated her voice to honeyed sweetness. “Would you care for some tea, Mr. Clark? I’ll prepare a pot of my very special recipe. Just for you.”

He waved a hand at her. “Save it. You see, Miss Marshall, I don’t wish to ruin the future you’ve so carefully built. I’m going to play the scoundrel here. All things considered, I’d rather be your scoundrel.”

She sat back. “Go ahead, Mr. Clark. Do your worst. I am inured to baseless threats. I don’t need your lies.”

He leaned back in his chair, a look of dissatisfaction on his face.

Of
course
he was glaring at her. She huffed in annoyance. “Yes, I am a terrible person. I refuse to give in to intimidation. I don’t need a scoundrel, thank you very much. Now good-bye.”

“Yes,” he said. “You do. Bugger it all.” He shut his eyes and placed his fingers against his temples. “I was hoping not to have to do this, but…”

Free narrowed her gaze at him. They’d run through lies, forgery, and blackmail. What was next? Physical threats?

“I’m going to have to tell you the truth,” he said with great reluctance. “Some of it. And I’m going to have to tell you enough to convince you I know what I’m doing.”

She didn’t believe that for one second.

“The person who is intent on destroying you is none other than the Honorable James Delacey.”

Free went very still. Delacey was also Viscount Claridge—or at least, he would be soon; there was some technical holdup in confirming him, although she gathered it was a simple procedural matter. Other than actually taking his seat in the House of Lords, he was afforded all the other social privileges of peerage. She’d met the man two years ago. Their acquaintance had been fortunately brief, and she had no wish to pursue it further. She set her hands on the table, pushing them flat against the cool surface.

The man in front of her did not mark her unease. “I would say that Delacey has no love for suffragettes, but it’s more complicated than that. His father never liked you; you shut down a factory that he’d invested in and lost him a great deal of money. And Delacey himself asked you to be his mistress some time ago, and you turned him down. He’s held a grudge ever since.”

If Clark knew
that,
he did stand high in the man’s counsel. It didn’t make him a friend; it didn’t mean he planned to help her. But he at least knew
something.

“Delacey plans to discredit you completely,” he said. “He’s going to have one of your writers arrested this weekend on suspicion of theft, and while you’re still reeling from the scandal of that, he’ll point out that several of your recent essays have been drawn from other papers. Your advertisers will withdraw and your subscription numbers will plummet.” Mr. Clark gave her a brilliant smile. “As I’m sure you can see, you are at something of a disadvantage. You don’t have to trust me, Miss Marshall. You don’t even have to like me. But if you don’t listen to me, you’ll regret it.”

“Why?” She speared him with her gaze. “Why are you doing this?”

He shrugged nonchalantly, but his fingers curled on the desk a little too tightly. “Because Delacey and I have an old score that needs to be settled.” Mr. Clark’s lips thinned and he looked out the window again, over her press. “It’s that simple. Delacey wants you hurt, and I will not forgive him. So we have a mutual enemy. I don’t pretend that we will be friends, you and I—but I came here to present myself as an ally. I didn’t have to tell you that I was capable of blackmail. I didn’t have to demonstrate my skill at forgery. If I had wanted to, I would have delivered you a recommendation from Queen Victoria herself. And—Miss Marshall—”

He leaned toward her, gesturing her close as if he wished to impart a great secret.

She couldn’t help herself. She leaned in.

“You know,” he said simply, “that if I’d wanted to be gentlemanly and agreeable, I could have charmed you. In an instant.”

A wash of heat passed through her, a flush that was half embarrassment and half acknowledgment of the truth. A beat passed while his eyes held hers. Oh, he was good at that—at giving her just that hint of attraction. Not so much as to put her off; just enough to intrigue her.

Free refused to be intrigued. “You could have,” she told him. “But charmed or not, I would still have been thinking.”

“I’m dishonorable and disreputable. I lie and I cheat, and I am telling you plainly that you are only a means to an end for me. I’m not telling you the truth, but overall, I’m not playing you false. You may not know the exact cards I hold, but you will know the score. I promise you that much.”

She didn’t trust him or his promises—not an inch. And yet he was right. He might be a dishonest man, but he’d not pretended to be anything else. It was a curious sort of honor.

“I am not playing you false,” he repeated. “Delacey is trying to ruin your reputation. Delacey intends to do far, far more, with lasting consequences. Tell me the truth, Miss Marshall. If you had the opportunity to beat Delacey, would you take it?”

She thought of her editorials, so painstakingly written—stolen from her, her heartfelt words twisted and butchered to serve causes that she hated. She thought of all the things that she’d heard Delacey say about her, coming to her on whispers and innuendo.

Every last ugly letter she’d received, every cowardly anonymous threat that she’d shoved in her rubbish bin, every sleepless night after he’d propositioned her.

She couldn’t lay all those terrible letters at Delacey’s door. But if he planned even a fraction of what Mr. Clark claimed, she wanted him held responsible.

He was trying to take what was hers. He was trying to beat her down, to make an example of her to all the women who looked to her and thought, “Well,
she
did it, so why can’t I?”

And he’d singled her out because she’d said no.

“Do I want Delacey held responsible?” she heard herself say. “Yes. Yes, I do.”

Mr. Clark nodded. “Then, Miss Marshall, you’re in need of a scoundrel.” He spread his hands, palms up. “And here I am.”

E
DWARD LOUNGED IN HIS SEAT
, letting Miss Marshall contemplate him. She’d leaned forward an inch, her nose wrinkling. Those things should have signified unease, but paired with the clear, calm gray of her eyes, they gave him no idea what she was thinking.

He had thought she would be easy to read. Ha. He had thought she’d be easy to manipulate. Another ha. She’d not bent an inch. He’d been wrong on both counts, and as confounding as this conversation had become, at least these next few weeks would be exciting.

Miss Marshall, he silently admitted, hadn’t needed to be any more exciting.

Her eyes focused on him unblinking. She tapped her lovely lips with a thumb. “What does Delacey have planned next?” she finally asked. “You said he was going to have one of my writers discredited. Which one?”

She hadn’t agreed yet to work with him, he noted. He’d been furious when he went through his brother’s notes and pieced together the extent of what James had planned.
A few things still in motion,
his brother had told him, with an airy wave of his hand. No doubt he thought those
few things
unimportant.

Miss Marshall leaned forward. “Amanda? Alice?” There was a ferocity in her tone, almost a growl at the back of her throat as if she were a mother wolf protecting her cubs.

“Not that I know of.” Edward frowned. “He wants Stephen Shaughnessy.”

She blinked and sat back. “Stephen? He writes one column a week. It’s purely for amusement.”

“Yes, but he’s a man.”

She snorted.

He tried again. “Shaughnessy is an excellent target because so many dislike him.”

Her jaw squared. “Only idiots dislike him.”

Protective and loyal, too. “Ah, but there are a great many idiots,” Edward told her, “and he inspires so many of them. He writes a column making fun of men. He’s Catholic. He’s Irish. He doesn’t know how to keep his mouth shut. You saw it yourself—matters are bad enough that his
own classmates
pelted him with dye.”

Miss Marshall winced. “That was one of his classmates?”

“Yes. There are a great many who are primed to believe the worst of him. And Delacey knows him—his father was a servant on his family’s estate. There’s some sort of bad blood there. I’m sure if you asked Shaughnessy, he could explain the details.”

She didn’t nod. Instead, she set her chin even more mulishly. “So what is Delacey planning to do to him?”

“Tonight, someone is going to remove a family possession from another student’s room and place it among Shaughnessy’s belongings.”

Her expression grew dark indeed. He smiled at her languidly, refusing to let her see the fury he still felt at that.

Having Stephen charged with theft, and likely removed from school, was what his brother had dismissed as
a few small things,
ones that need not concern either of them overly much.

Miss Marshall considered this. “What do you propose to do about it?”

“I’ll follow the man in, take the item, hide it somewhere outside,” Edward said. “I could do all that without you. But it would be best if Shaughnessy had an unassailable alibi for the evening. I trust you can make that happen.”