After the Scandal

by Elizabeth Essex

  Claire turned toward him with a smile. In the warming light of morning, her porcelain perfection was disrupted by the frown pleating her forehead. And by the damn bruises scrawled across her cheek in obscene color.

  He should have killed Rosing—Rosing was the one person Tanner was absolutely sure was an unrepentant villain. He should have held his hand across the man’s face, and smothered the useless life out of him when he had the chance.

  “Tanner? Was everything all to rights with Mr. Solomon?”

  Tanner willed the rage to leech away.

  “Yes,” he assured her, the falsehoods falling easily from his tongue. “That is just his way. I didn’t like to pay him in front of you. He might have refused the money. Pride always asserts itself more strongly in the presence of a beautiful lady.”

  She shook her head, and pulled her scarf up over her head as they passed their reflections in the dusty window of an antique bookseller. “I’m not beautiful today. I feel like I never will again.”

  The hot surge of rage came back so instantly, he had reached out to stop her with an almost-rough grip at her elbow before he could stop himself.

  “Claire, you will always be beautiful. Even when you are old and frail and gray, you will still be beautiful, because you are good and kind. And that is the kind of beauty that lasts.”

  He realized too late that he must be hurting her—her gaze had gone to his hand at her elbow—and he let go.

  But she did not object, or chide him for his boorish behavior. She hugged her elbows lightly to her middle, and gave him that lovely, bittersweet, quick little smile.

  “My goodness. I do believe that is the nicest compliment anyone has ever paid me. Thank you, Your Gr—” She stopped herself. “Thank you, Tanner.”

  Ask her now, his brain told him. Now, before there are fathers, and talk of scandals, and imperatives about what must be done. Ask her now, when her heart is open, and her eyes are wide and looking at you with something more than regard or affection. Something close to worship.

  Ask her.

  “Lady Claire—”

  “Oh, come now. Claire, if you please. We’re friends now, are we not?”

  Ah. The word went through him like a sword—sharp and effortlessly lethal.

  Friends.

  “Yes.” He answered because that was what a gentleman did.

  A gentleman did not howl on the pavement like a wounded beast. A gentleman did not haul her to him, and tell her what she could do with her talk of friendship. He did not.

  He used his brain to make a new plan. “You will not be surprised to find that the Honorable Edward Laytham was the client who came to visit Elias.”

  “Was he? Well I confess I am surprised. I rather thought he was the country man, who didn’t know the inferior work up on the High Holburn. Why would anyone who was having a fob made at an inferior place like—what was the name of it?”

  “Field and Parker.”

  “Why would a man like that bring a real coin to Mr. Solomon?”

  Here Tanner was on firmer ground. “A man brings a gold coin to someone like Elias Solomon to have it authenticated. To make sure it is real.”

  “But we know this fob—perhaps owned by Mr. Laytham, perhaps by Lord Peter Rosing—is a fake?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, it all just makes no sense. At least it doesn’t make sense to me. I’m sure you’ll have sussed the whole thing out.”

  “I am sorry to say I have not sussed the whole thing out—I have the same questions, and no answers.”

  “And for answers we need to go to St. Catherine’s Dock? I saw your face back there, when Mr. Solomon mentioned Walker’s yard—you lit up like a Guy Fawkes bonfire. Is that where you think we should go next?”

  He did want to go. There was nothing he liked better than following one piece of evidence into another and amassing the facts. It was what he did.

  It was what he did best.

  And they were already more than half way across London. It would take little time to make their way to Parson’s Stairs.

  But he learned his lessons well—he had learned better.

  “You tell me, Claire. Where do you think we should go next?”

  Chapter 13

  “Where exactly is St. Catherine’s Dock?” She felt stupid asking—clearly it was somewhere within London.

  But he didn’t seem to mind educating her.

  “A few miles southeast.” In fact, it was as if he were merely waiting for the opportunity to consult the map in his head. “From here at Cripplegate, down the length of the old London wall to Bishopsgate.”

  He made those silently elegant gestures indicating the direction. “Then across Cammomile Lane, down Houndsditch, toward Whitechapel. And south down Minories past Little Tower Hill, and on to Wapping.”

  It was the other side of the world. “Wapping. It sounds so far away. As far away as...”

  “A West Indies Island.” He smiled, and laughed with her at the absurdity of it all. “Yes.”

  “Well.” She followed his instruction, and turned east down Jewin Street. “I’ve never been to the West Indies.”

  He fell in beside her. “Nor I,” he admitted. His smile was all over his face, from his dancing eyes to his laughing mouth. He looked entirely boyish. And entirely irresistible. “Wapping is as exotic as I get.”

  Claire would have laughed, but then she remembered. “Oh, no! And your sister lives there. I’m sorry.”

  “So am I,” he admitted cheerfully. “But I hate to sail.”

  “Do you? Oh, goodness—” She covered her astonished laugh with her hand. “And you said you’d been in the navy!”

  “I was, God help me.” Yet his face was nearly cleaved in two by that boyish, rapscallion smile. He was as unguarded and open as she had ever seen him. “I was awful. Completely hopeless. The worst.”

  “But you’re so good with boats.”

  “Rowing. I’ve learned to be. But I nearly got Jack killed back in the navy. Thought I had done, actually, for years.”

  “Oh, no. No.” She reached for his arm, as if she could reassure him. But they were both laughing so hard they were leaning against each other, easy and natural. “You poor thing.”

  And it seemed as if the most natural thing she could do was reach up on her tip toes, and kiss him, right there, on his laughing cheek.

  He had a dimple, and her mouth landed right there in the lovely, laughing crease.

  There in the middle of Cripplegate, with God and everyone in the world watching.

  It was nothing really, just a quick buss on the cheek—but it was somehow everything. Everything she was feeling. Everything that rose up within her, and had to find expression in action.

  Everything she wanted to say and couldn’t.

  And so she kissed him.

  His skin was rough with the barest rasp of whiskers against her lips.

  She pulled back, and turned away before she had time or thought, to register anything else. But not before she had time to see the almost-stunned look upon his face, and see him bring his hand up to touch his just-kissed face.

  Heat boiled out of her, basting her from the top of her head down to the toes of her sturdy boots—she was mortified and pleased, and sorry and not sorry, all at the same time.

  So she did what she always did when she felt awkward—she made small talk. “I went to the Tower once. When I was a girl. To see the lion there.”

  “Me, too,” he answered, and then shook his head. “Used to sneak in often, or as often as I could get away from my sister. I’d sneak in one gate or another—always thought it a grand lark to sneak into the Tower. But I’d go there, and eat my meat pie.”

  It was almost as if he were taking pity on her, and making small talk himself. Except that his talk wasn’t small. It was quite big. Nearly fantastical.

  “I loved meat pies. We didn’t have a home where we could cook—just a rented room—so we bought food ready made from carts and cook-hous
es. My poor sister. I was always hungry. And I’d look at that old lion there at the tower, and he looked hungry, too. And I’d throw him a bit of my meat pie, in solidarity. The keeper used to get after me. Threaten me with his pike.”

  And he acted it out for her, miming the clumsy oaf of a keeper coming after young Tanner with his imaginary pike. “What a strange life.”

  “What an extraordinary life.” And she was glad.

  Glad she had kissed him. Glad he was with her, laughing and having the silliest, easiest fun. Glad he was such a strange, wonderful sort of duke, who had stolen his way across London, and been chased by keepers in their Beefeater reds, and lived his extraordinary life to thrive and be with her. And help her.

  And chase after a murderer.

  “Oh, God. We’re laughing and Maisy is dead. She’s not even cold in her grave, because she’s not even in a grave yet. And... And it’s all so...”

  “Hard. Yes.” His words were exactly as they had been in the boathouse. “It is hard. Life is hard. All the more reason to laugh while we can, Claire. Don’t you think?”

  “I suppose. I suppose I’m just being silly. You must think me mad, laughing one moment, and as sober and Friday-faced as a preacher, the next.”

  “Now that,” he said with another charmingly boyish smile, “is another phrase of the fancy that you ought not to know—Friday-faced. I can’t imagine your very thorough governess taught you that. Your brothers, I assume?”

  He was teasing her. “Yes, my brothers. They’re as mad as me. Madder.”

  “I don’t think you’re mad, Claire. I think you’ve been up all night, and half the day. I think you’ve been rowed across one half of the county, been walked across the other half of London. And been shoved up against a brick wall and almost raped. If anyone has an excuse to act mad, it’s you. It’s been one hell of a night.”

  Claire took a deep, deep breath of London’s coal singed air, and took his hand. “And a day. And it’s not over yet.”

  St. Catherine’s Dock lay along the river in the shadow of the Tower, clinging to the edge of the river while the dark ribbon of water in the middle of the muddy channel curved eastward toward the bigger, more important docks to the east.

  But Tanner’s entire world was boiling down to a single point of warm, physical contact.

  Because she had caught up his hand in her own, and smiled at him, as if he had done her the greatest favor in the world.

  No one had ever held his hand before—at least not since he was young. He had outgrown that kind of oversight very early—it would have been nigh unto impossible to pick a pocket if he were holding someone’s hands. And harder to eat if he were not stealing.

  But he liked holding her hand, for no particular reason that he could fathom. Again, he thought of the almost puppyish physical relationship he had had with his sister, sleeping rough and clinging to each other for warmth and support.

  Perhaps that sort of need had been trained out of him when he became Fenmore, though his grandmother had always been—and remained—both staunchly supportive of him and physically demonstrative. A great one for gentle touches was his grandmother.

  But this—this voluntary press of Claire’s flesh against his for no other reason that mutual comfort—or perhaps satisfaction—was worlds different. And he liked it.

  He liked her.

  She was useful to him, in a way he had not imagined—he had thought it would be him showing her what life in the Almonry and the City were like, teaching her as he had promised.

  But she had schooled him just as effectively, showing him that she, with her tangible empathy, was an equal counterweight to his clever analytical mind.

  Together they were better than they were apart.

  How extraordinary.

  She smiled at him, blithely unaware of the havoc she was wrecking within him.

  They reached the river at Iron Gate Stairs where the busy wharf was full of the local ironmongers and their trade. There were empty vessels aplenty beached in the mud beneath the stairs, and Tanner was in such an expansive mood, he didn’t mind simply stealing one.

  “Hop in.”

  When Claire was seated, he dragged the vessel through the slippery mud along the rotting plankway, until they reached the water.

  “Is this one yours, too, this boat?” Claire asked quietly as they slipped out into the thinned stream of the river.

  “It is now. And I’ll pay whoever owns it handsomely for its use when we return—if he notices its absence.”

  But his ethical slipperiness brought no censure, just, “How casually larcenous you are.”

  She had the truth of it there. “You have no idea,” he said almost to himself.

  But Claire was listening, and she was quick to answer. “I’m getting a better idea, with every minute that passes.”

  But she was smiling in her lovely teasing way. Almost as if she didn’t mind his stealing.

  Almost as if she didn’t mind him stealing her.

  Now, he was the one who had gone mad.

  Tanner rowed them slowly down the line of wharves at St. Catherine’s dock, taking a long look at the buildings, counting and measuring off the distance as he went. Making sure he could see two ways in, and three ways out of every place he passed.

  The old habits died the hardest.

  But his old habits had saved his neck more than a time or two. And he was glad of them when he spied what had to be a decrepit lead works—a rickety rectangular structure rising about a hundred feet over piers that extended out to the edge of the water.

  The ramshackle building had all the makings of a less than successful shot tower, being too short—a good shot tower needed to be about two hundred feet in height to produce rounded lead shot by the water drop method—and in a general state of disrepair. Broken panes of window glass had not been attended to, and the wooden framing had weathered and warped out of alignment.

  For all that Walker was supposed to be new in the business, his yard had all the looks of a place on its last legs. Young Walker was in clearly in trouble.

  Tanner’s careful perusal of the place yielded a forgotten trapdoor under the pilings. He rowed them beneath, and found that the trap was locked with a padlock on the inside—he could raise the door just enough to feel the pull, and hear the thunk of the lock against the hasp.

  “So here’s the plan,” he said to Claire as he methodically checked his weapons again, running his fingers over the pistol, and touching the knife in his boot—touchstones for this portion of his life. “We’ll row to the Parson’s Stair, where you’ll drop me off, and then I want you to row back here, slow and casual like, and wait in the general vicinity of that trap door.”

  He watched her try to gauge the distance. “What if I’m seen?”

  “You’ll be fine—just a girl out for a row. No one’s business but hers. If you have to wait, lay low in the bottom of the boat, as if you’re sleeping—taking a bit of a kip, all lazy-like in the morning sun. Just be ready when I open the trapdoor.”

  “Ready for what?”

  He could feel his face curve into a smile. “Ready for anything, darling. Ready for anything.”

  He could see the quick-fire excitement—the heady, jangling energy that always gathered within him before a job—start to take hold of her.

  “I can do it,” she said to assure them both, her eyes wide and glistening blue against the river and sky.

  And she did look as if she were ready. As if she were up for anything. Which was good, because he might find anything in that yard. Or nothing.

  And that was the way he liked it.

  His sister liked to plan. She liked to be careful. She always cautioned him to look sharp.

  He did look sharp—always. He couldn’t stop, even if he wanted to—even if he wanted to go to a ball, and dance, and not see everything.

  His sister would have cautioned him to ask around—to ask someone like the Lark—to find out everything she and the rest of the mudla
rks who roamed the Thames’ muddy tidal river bed might know about goings on down St. Catherine’s Dock.

  But he wasn’t one for too much caution. He wanted to act.

  He liked to work on the spur of the moment. He liked to ride by the seat of his pants and feel the reins in his hands. He liked to take his chances.

  And he liked it best of all, that Lady Claire Jellicoe was going to take that chance with him.

  They arrived at the Parson’s Stair in less than half a minute.

  “Right then?” He nodded at her to make sure. “I’ll cover the street and you cover the river. Two ways in, and three ways out of every hole. I’ll feel better knowing you’ll be here, floating just beyond the piers, if someone comes. Just don’t let anyone else near the boat.”

  He shoved the gun butt-first into her hands. “Shoot to kill.”

  After a horrified second, she pushed it back at him.

  “Oh, no! You’re better off with it, and I’m better off without it. I’ll have my hands full enough with the oars. I’ll row away if there’s trouble, and then come back. Just be as quick as you can.”

  “I will.” But he didn’t like to leave her defenseless. He stripped off the pouch hanging from the string around his neck, and handed it to her in lieu of a weapon. “That’s yours if anything should happen. If any—”

  He didn’t know what else to say. He felt like a like gravedigger—up to his arse in the business with nowhere to turn. “It’s yours.”

  “All right.” She took the strange necklace, and looped it around her own neck, thankfully without asking for any further explanation. “If you’re sure.”

  “I’m sure. Here we go.”

  Tanner jumped out of the skiff as it scraped against the plankway, strode across the mud flat up onto the water stairs, and purposefully onto St. Catherine’s Lane.

  The entry gates to the brewery were directly across from Parson’s Stairs, and so there was plenty of custom and carts in the lane to cover his approach.

  He counted off the yards until he reached the gate below the shot tower.