After the Scandal

by Elizabeth Essex

  She had never felt less herself.

  In contrast, Tanner looked more himself than ever, even dressed as his own servant.

  There was as strange grace to him—an unaffected frankness—that was more than appealing than even the rough and tumble rogue of the redingote and jerkin.

  Appealing in an entirely different way.

  For the first time in their acquaintance—although acquaintance was a pale word for their rather interesting and very unusual association—the Duke of Fenmore looked entirely at ease. He looked satisfied even—laughing at himself as if dressing as his own servant were the greatest joke in the world.

  He looked like the naughtiest of schoolboys, having a marvelous time at his own expense—young and happy and amused in an entirely unaffected way. As if he simply couldn’t help himself.

  As if for this one small moment he had stopped thinking, and simply let himself be content.

  Claire wanted to be content—to be happy—as well, but she could not entirely silence her qualms about their present masquerade.

  “Dressed like this, people will treat us as if we were invisible. They will see only station, and think us too unimportant to bother looking at our faces. And when people don’t see us, they will say things. Revealing and important things.”

  It was hard to resist his obvious enthusiasm. She followed him out of the rag trader’s yard, and after a few blocks along the Strand, around Charing Cross and down Spring Garden behind the Admiralty.

  He was easy, but aware in an alert sort of way—watchful, even as he ambled along the pavement. After a few minutes they came out of the close streets and headed down the long, shaded expanse of the Mall between Charlton House and St. James’s Park.

  At this time of the morning there was only a smattering of nannies and their young charges strolling about the lawns and pathways of the park, and despite feeling as if she looked entirely out of place, no one paid them the least mind.

  For all the world, they looked like a footman and his lass walking out in the park.

  But she had never walked out with anyone, much less a footman, before.

  Or with a duke.

  They carried on in silence for a few long minutes, walking slightly apart along the line of trees.

  He did nothing to resume their previous intimacy, and she took it as a lesson to herself—his regard was a product of the role he played, and nothing more. A role he must have played fairly often.

  “Does Tilly Wheeler know that you are Fenmore? Does Mr. Solomon? Does everyone?”

  “Not everyone. I’ve endeavored to be circumspect about it. But Tilly must know. She’s known me for years—since long before I had to become Fenmore.”

  His words caught Claire’s ear. “Had to become?”

  “Ah.” He tipped his head to the side again in his considering way, but he did not look at her. He looked away, out over the open field of the park. Some of his ease evaporated.

  “I suppose it must seem very strange to you, but I was not at all a willing recipient of my grandmother’s benefice. Not that I minded the food, or the soft bed—but I minded the rest of it. The relentless schooling, the endless lists of dos and don’ts. The obligations and expectations. The bathing. Good God, you can’t imagine how I hated the bathing. It all seems quite silly now, but I was vehement enough about it then.”

  It was not hard to imagine him as such a boy—he was still vehement enough now, only about other things.

  “It must have been very hard.” It was hard enough for her to live up to her Jellicoe family expectations and obligations, and she had had her whole life to become accustomed. And she did not have to become a duke. “What of your sister?”

  “She managed more gracefully. But she also married, and moved away with her husband to start a new life, entirely out of society.”

  “Ah, yes, the West Indies.”

  “Yes. Rather too far away to help ease my way with her practical, rather forceful logic. I had to manage the change on my own.”

  She heard what he had not said just as clearly as if he had been able to articulate his particular experience of loneliness.

  “Well, you’ve done a rather magnificent job of it, if you ask me. I never knew you were anything but Fenmore.”

  “No one is meant to know. At least not in society. And they are not meant to know that I am still rather more than just Fenmore.”

  He stopped, and looked at her then. That piercing, straightforward, intelligent gaze that made her feel as if she were the only person he could see in the entire world, when she knew it wasn’t true—he saw everything. Every tiny, telling detail. Every bruise and cut. Every blush and stammer.

  It was part of his particular genius to make her feel as if he were only looking at her.

  He broke his gaze, and quickly looked around, and then lowered his voice, even though they were entirely alone.

  “You ought to know this, Claire. That I do this—go off, on my own, not as Fenmore—for a reason. It’s not just a lark.”

  She knew she was frowning at him, scowling really, but his tone—everything about him—was making her worry. “I know it’s not a lark. It’s to help Maisy Carter, isn’t it, and bring her murderer to justice?”

  “No.” He shook his head, and his grim vehemence was back, just as strong and startling as it had been in the first moments she had met him. “Not just today, for Maisy Carter. I do it all the time, really. Whenever I’m needed.”

  He was still looking at her rather intently—waiting in that way that made her feel that what he was saying was a sort of a test.

  Her chest began to feel tight. “Needed by whom?”

  “The Admiralty, mostly. Jack Denman is the only other person who knows the whole of it.”

  The creeping unease she had been able to hold at bay, was back, skittering up her spine and down her arms, and wrapping itself tight around her chest. “The whole of it?”

  He was frowning at her now, leaning down toward her, as if he were willing her to understand.

  “I inherited the job from my brother-in-law, the naval captain. He did it before me—the difficult, impossible, illegal things that need to be done sometimes. Find things or people—like murderers. Things and people that the Admiralty, or other parts of the government can’t get for themselves. So I get them. I steal things for them. Whenever I can.”

  Claire hardly knew what to say. “Good heavens.”

  “I keep my hand in. Keep up the old connections, the old habits and places that are still useful to me. Like those footpads. And the Lark, and Elias Solomon, and Tilly Wheeler. All of them. So it’s not just a lark, a game, all this.”

  He spread his hands out before him, much as he had before. “I do have a purpose. I just thought you ought to know. That’s all.”

  As if her opinion of him, her esteem for him, mattered.

  She had thought him a strange different sort of man—haunted like the veteran sailors and soldiers. And that was what he was—haunted by a criminal past he could not give up.

  But there was one more thing she had to know. “And do you like it? This helping and stealing and finding murderers?”

  “Ah.” He let out a great draught of air, as if he were relieved to get the whole of it off his chest. “God, help me, yes.”

  Tanner had never felt so exposed.

  He had never felt less disguised, even rigged up in livery.

  Everything that he was, was laid bare to her.

  And he didn’t know what he was going to do about it, because he had no idea in the world what she was going to do about it.

  Her face—her tiny, heart shaped, orchid bloom of a face—was entirely blank. Or perhaps it only seemed blank because so many different, conflicting emotions ran across it at once—horror and pity and astonishment and fear.

  But she didn’t say anything about horror or pity or astonishment or fear. She nodded, and said, “You like it. And it is necessary? For the country?”

  “Yes.”
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  “Then that is right.” She nodded again, solemn, and troubled, and wise. “And will you do the same for me? Do illegal things, and find things out, and find a murderer?”

  “Yes.” He would do anything for her. “I will do whatever you need me to do. Always. No matter what.”

  No matter if she rejected him. No matter if she never spoke to him again. He would always watch out for her, and help her, any way he could.

  Always.

  She smiled then. A small, ironic little smile. But it gave him hope.

  “As if I’m a sort of private Admiralty?” she asked, in a way that he thought was a soft, ironic tease. “Or you’re my private naval force, ready to vanquish all comers, just as effectively as you vanquished Lord Peter?”

  “Yes.” Would that he could do more.

  She turned, and faced down the length of the Mall. “Then, Tanner, tell me how we are going to vanquish Mr. Edward Laytham, or whomever it is that murdered Maisy Carter?”

  There it was again—his name on her beautiful lips. The name he gave himself in the privacy of his own mind.

  When she smiled at him, and called him Tanner, whatever else he had meant to say was drowned out by a wave of pleasure so incomprehensible and inexplicable and vast, he was hopeless to resist.

  And so he didn’t. “Stealthfully.”

  “Like the Bible—do good by stealth?”

  “Aye. Biblical justice—that’s what I’m good at.”

  She smiled at him, and thought she looked as neat as respectable as a pin, in a plain gray frock, white apron and starched cap, under all that respectability was the heart of determination—the heart of a thief.

  “Come with me.” He held out his hand. “Let’s go find some justice at Tattersall’s.”

  She took it.

  And he held on, palm pressed to palm, until they came nearer to the Queen’s Buckingham House, and he cut them across into Green Park, where he found a willing urchin to take instruction to his home, Fenmore House, standing in the distance across Piccadilly.

  “I’ve sent for a horse,” he told Claire. “Easiest thing to walk into Tattersall’s Repository at the lead end of a horse.”

  She smiled, but she looked across the park toward Piccadilly and Fenmore House, for such a long moment, as if she could see up White Horse Street to her own home at Sanderson House.

  The short distance between the two gated town houses had tantalized him for years.

  When he had been a raw youth, struggling to find his place at in society and Eton, he would return to ground in London, sneaking away from Fenmore House, eluding tutors and minders alike, to return to wandering the streets as he had when he had been a hungry, ambitious boy.

  But even then, he had always gravitated toward young Lady Claire Jellicoe’s orbit, toward the wedding cake of Sanderson House behind the wrought iron gates on Curzon Street, in the hopes that he might see her, coming or going, the pale, blonde moon of her face looking out at him from the window of a coach with the family, or riding her pony under the supervision of the huge, protective coachman in the wide front yard.

  “Still determined?”

  She turned back, and he could see her resolution writ across her face, in the clarity of her gaze, and in the firm line of her jaw. “Yes. Quite. As you said, past bloody time.”

  He liked when she swore. He like the passionate incongruity of foul words coming out of such a pristine mouth. It amused him. And it reminded him that she was a great deal more than he had ever thought her.

  She was unique, and special, and he needed to have a care with her.

  A stable lad from Fenmore House met them at the Hyde Park Turnpike gates, all wide eyes and gaping mouth at the sight of his master clad as a footman. But the lad knew enough to mind his jaw and not ruin the rig.

  “All to rights, then, up the house?”

  The lad shook his head. “There’s goings on, up to the house, sir. Powerful lot of folks looking for you.”

  “Are they?” Tanner kept his voice calm and reassuring. “Not to worry. Turns out I’m looking for them, as well.”

  He might have thought to say more, or make further inquiry of the boy, but they were so close to Tattersall’s he could see the well-dressed crowds, and feel the pull of that jangling excitement he got before a job, his fingers nearly itching to get to work.

  But he also knew some of his excitement was a sort of raw happiness at having told her. At having her still by his side in the aftermath.

  He led her down the long court off Grosvenor Place and through the milling crowd toward the back side of Tattersall’s famous ring. He’d run a number of different scenarios through his head about the best way to find Laytham—the easiest would be to find a central vantage point from which Claire could identify him.

  “Stick close—it may be very crowded. We’ll make our way across the yard to a better vantage point.”

  There was a wagon, still loaded with hay, parked up flush against a wall—a number of younger boys had already clambered aboard in search of a way to see over the crowds.

  “I don’t think I can go in there.” She swallowed hard, and shook her head, and he could see that her face had gone pale. “All those men—I know most of them. What if one of them recognizes me? Or what if my brother sees me?”

  He could hear the panic edging into her voice. “Easy, Claire. Hush. The animal will give us some room—no one will crowd her.” Then he pointed the hay cart out to her. “We’ll go there, and be sheltered. You can stand on the whiffle-tree or some such, and I’ll stand in front to screen you. You can hide behind me. Will that suit?”

  She nodded, but he could tell she was still overwhelmed. More than overwhelmed—scared. And he couldn’t blame her. She ducked her head and raised her hand to cover her bruised cheek with her hand.

  But without her, he had no way of identifying Laytham. He put his arm around her shoulder, and used the animal to cut a wide swath through the crowds, but even before they had reached the wagon, he heard mutterings in their wake.

  “Did you see? Fenmore’s livery,” some sharp-eyed sportsman turned to his friend as they passed.

  “Is he here? Did you see him?”

  “No. Why?” another asked. “What have you heard?”

  Tanner slowed as best he could, letting the horse put it’s head down to whuff at the grass, making the crowd jostle and buffet around him, so he could keep listening.

  “I heard he killed a man,” the first one said.

  “I heard he’s cut and run,” a second sportsman reported, “with the Earl Sanderson’s daughter.”

  “Eloped with Lady Claire? Fenmore? Is he mad?”

  “Must be. The earl’s likely to gut him. But they do say Fenmore’s peculiar.”

  They had no idea just how peculiar he was, nor how peculiar he was prepared to be.

  Not that he particularly minded for himself—he was quite at home living on the fringes of respectable society—but it was nearly killing him to walk on by without revealing himself when he heard people speak of Lady Claire in such gleefully malicious tones.

  He wanted to gut them, and leave them bleeding on the manicured grass. He wanted to grab them by their starched, pointy collars, and haul them up close so he could tell them to their ugly, smug faces that they were base bastards unfit to even speak her name.

  But he shut his gob, and moved on, because beneath his hands, that same Lady Claire began to tremble.

  He gathered her closer against his chest, and leaned down to tell her, “Keep going. We’re almost there.”

  He could not read the look she gave him—incredulous, and hurt, and something else unfathomable.

  In another moment they were able to take shelter in the lee of the hay wagon, and he got her out of sight, where she could lean against the big back wheel. “Better?”

  “Did you hear what they said?” Her voice was thin, and more than scared—it was devastated. “My God. You were right about us being invisible.”

&nb
sp; Ah. He had forgotten to warn her that one of the perils of invisibility was that one didn’t always hear what one wanted to hear.

  “Yes. I’m sorry.” And it surprised him, frankly, that the news had traveled so far, so fast.

  The Earl Sanderson had always struck Tanner as a circumspect, prudent man, who ought to have done a better job to keep such a report from circulating. And her parents would know that he hadn’t run off with her to Gretna Green—they ought to have had her note by now.

  Not that it mattered to him. The outcome was still the same—she was his. He had stolen her fair and square, and would make his offer as soon as he judged it would be met successfully.

  But perhaps he had misjudged it, and left it too late. “Don’t listen to them. They don’t know the truth.”

  “I don’t care. It’s awful the way they were talking about you.”

  “Me?” The accusation, and all it’s implications, didn’t do anything other than cause him mild surprise—a minor hitching of his breath. Perhaps he had hit Rosing harder than he thought.

  And even if he had killed Rosing, Tanner felt no remorse—the man was a monster. Rosing had hurt Claire—probably more than even Tanner knew.

  He would kill him again in a heartbeat.

  Claire was not so sanguine. “The truth is that I ran off with you, not the other way round.” Her lovely brow was all pleated up with indignation, but there was real worry there, in the dark shading of her eyes. “But what worries me is what the other man said, about killing a man?”

  God’s balls. A new thought intruded—what if he lost her because he had in fact killed Rosing? What if he were hauled away to stand upon his actions?

  The thought of submitting himself to the less than gentle care of magisterial authority was not appealing. It would also cock up his ability to find out exactly what had happened, and exactly how Maisy Carter was connected the the counterfeiting in St. Catherine’s Dock.

  But Claire’s mind was running in an entirely different, but related direction. “We have do do something, Tanner,” she insisted. “We have to get you out of here, and protect you.”

  As a declaration of love, it lacked a certain passion, but it was a good start. It was more than he had a right to hope after only one night and half a day.