Lady Notorious

by Theresa Romain

  Death in men of about sixty years of age was nothing to be surprised about. But the supposedly accidental drowning, shooting, and poisoning his lordship described were, perhaps, out of the realm of both chance and coincidence.

  “Would you really prefer his safety?” Cass had asked. “Surely you want to inherit your father’s dukedom.” No sense in avoiding relevant questions.

  “What a horrible thing to say.” Northbrook had studied her, then tipped his head. “Yet it’s good that you said it. Someone’s got to ask that sort of question. And the answer is no, I’m not keen to inherit just yet. Not if it means my father’s life is cut short. He’s an indifferent father and little better as a duke, but if he dies, he won’t have the chance to correct any of that. And I dearly hope he will.”

  “Hope is nothing to live for,” Charles pointed out.

  “Fine. Then it’s for my own sake. I’m ill-prepared for the responsibility just yet. May my father live to a great old age so I can squander a few more decades in debauchery and play.”

  Cass had looked at him cautiously. He was handsome, this bright-eyed, black-haired man, and dressed in the height of fashion. He looked much like every other good-looking and careless pink of the ton she’d ever seen. “I can’t tell if you’re joking.”

  “I’m always joking a little bit but serious underneath. Once you know that, you can see to my very soul and understand me utterly. It’s a great curse.”

  He said this, of course, as if he were joking, but his blue eyes were deep and worried. She had smiled then, almost.

  Yet Northbrook had hired the Bentons to watch not over his father, but Lord Deverell. She pointed this out delicately. After all, he needn’t have hired Cass and Charles at all. Unless their hiring was an attempt to divert suspicion from him? Unless . . . unless . . .

  Being an investigator was a devil of a job. It was so difficult to shut off the suspicions and questions.

  In this case, Northbrook’s answer was simple. “I will watch over my father as best I can,” said the marquess. “Living in the same household, I’m well placed to do so. I ask you to watch over Deverell because he is my godfather. I have fond feelings for him and should not like harm to come to him.”

  That made sense. Cass could accept it. And for five pounds a week, she’d watch a chamber pot if she had to, and she’d stifle the question that kept coming to mind: Just how much did the heir truly want his father saved?

  She had wondered that throughout the past week; she had also wondered whether the whole story of the tontine was a fabrication. Only when she overheard Lord Deverell discussing it did she relax—slightly—and trust Northbrook’s word—cautiously.

  But at this moment, with Charles outside and Lord Deverell silently sequestered, Northbrook wasn’t being logical. As Cass pointed out to her blue-blooded employer, whispering in the return of nighttime quiet outside the study, “Lady Deverell wouldn’t cause a distraction to allow her husband to be harmed. She will not benefit from the tontine if Lord Deverell is killed.”

  Northbrook was only deterred for a second. “Unless she’s formed an alliance with some other interested party. We already know she is willing to form an, ahem, alliance with your brother.”

  Damn. He made a decent point. He even used the magic word unless. “You think like one of us,” Cass granted.

  “I will take the compliment with admirable grace.”

  She wasn’t sure if it was a compliment at all, but she let that pass. “I’ll keep to my post. Thank you for seeing to my brother.”

  “Of course.” When Northbrook stepped forward, the light about the study door traced the determined line of his jaw. He hesitated, looking down at Cass. One hand lifted, stroking Cass’s cheek with a touch that was surprisingly tender. “Thank you for seeing to my godfather.”

  Her skin prickled; her lips parted—but before she could speak, he slipped back out the way he’d come.

  And the interlude was over. The watch upon the study door resumed. Now, due to the fracas upstairs, there was every reason for Cass to be up and about. She could leave her hiding place in the shadows.

  Her first step was locking the front door. Treacherous hands; they were still unsteady as they wrestled with the great key. At last, she clicked the lock into place. With fingertips that trembled, she touched the spot on her face that still tingled from Northbrook’s touch.

  The caress was odd, that was all. It was but another oddness in tonight’s string of them. She and Northbrook worked well enough together when they had to, but they were certainly not friends. They shared no tender feelings, nothing more than a tie of business.

  He’d seen to that the first time they met. It had been at the home of their mutual friends, Lady Isabel Jenks—noble by birth—and her husband, the former Bow Street Runner Callum Jenks. They’d been discussing some case, and Northbrook, who was there merely for pleasure and whose opinion had not been solicited, gave it all the same.

  “She’s so plain,” he’d said of Cass.

  And he so handsome. It had hurt to overhear that.

  But he’d begged her pardon, and she’d set him straight about her capabilities, and he’d begged her pardon again. They’d worked together well enough since then.

  She touched her cheek again, then shook off her wondering feeling. She’d a job to do, an earl to observe.

  It really was not right that Lord Deverell remained completely silent, was it? If he had passed out from drink, he could die of it.

  Cass was only feet away and ought to see to her supposed employer. Anyone would be upset by a footman toppling out a window; surely it wouldn’t be unusual for a housemaid to speak to the master after the mistress had such a scare. She had the excuse of being new to the household, unfamiliar with his lordship’s strict insistence on not being disturbed in the study.

  She crept forward, ears drinking in the silence around her, then scratched at the study door. “My lord? It’s Polly.” Every housemaid here was called Polly. The Deverells found it easier that way to summon one when needed.

  No answer to her greeting. She rested her hand on the door handle, easing the latch. “My lord?” she ventured, her voice a bit louder now.

  No answer still. And shouldn’t the study door have been locked?

  Dread prickled between her shoulder blades. Again, something was not as it ought to be.

  In one gesture, she flung the door wide and leaped into the room. Her hand slid into her pocket, finding the familiar butt of her pistol.

  No answer. No response. No one here.

  She looked around to be certain. There was the empty desk, the long velvet sofa with its back to her. The wall of shelved books and ledgers, everything in its place.

  But heavy draperies stirred as if there were someone behind them. Seizing a penknife from a desk, she marched to the opposite wall and flung the curtains back.

  No one. Nothing. The window was open to the summer night, that was all. The curtains swayed from the breeze, not human touch.

  Peering out, she looked for some sign of Charles. The lamps around Cavendish Square cast a glow bright enough for her to see that the earth outside this window was undisturbed. Much as she should have expected; Lady Deverell’s chamber windows faced a different direction. Charles lay, if he still lay on the ground, around the corner and out of Cass’s sight.

  She left the window sash as it was. When she turned her back to it and again faced the room, she saw the earl.

  On the long sofa, designed more for fashion than comfort, Lord Deverell snored. Between his outstretched legs, a stiletto pinned a folded note to the upholstery.

  The blade had sliced his thigh, and blood soaked the once-beautiful velvet of the sofa. When Cass stepped closer, the air smelled heavy with the coppery scent of spilled blood, and with the brandy that had pickled the earl so thoroughly that he’d lost himself to sense.

  Lord Northbrook had been right: Deverell was indeed in danger. Yet he was snoring right through the ebb of his own li
feblood.

  How was Cass to keep a man from getting killed if he was determined to speed the process along?

  Chapter Two

  As a man of fashion, George used to stay up all night during the season as a matter of course, but he hadn’t made a habit of it since his mother’s brush with death the previous year. After spending a day and a night and a day with the physician, keeping the duchess alive despite her own best efforts to slip away on a wave of laudanum, George had been ready to fall into bed and sleep the sleep of the righteous.

  His mother was in decent health now, though she remained in laudanum’s thrall. And eventually, Lord Deverell would be all right, too—thanks, after another endless night, to Cassandra Benton.

  He faced Miss Benton over tea in the Ardmore House drawing room in late morning. It was the same day Lady Deverell had screamed the house down, the same day that Charles Benton had tried to play romantic adventurer and fallen from a trellis—but it felt as if days had passed since the countess’s cries had split the nighttime silence.

  How Miss Benton had passed the hours after their parting, she had already told him: the wounded earl discovered, the physician summoned, the old earl’s treatment. It seemed certain Lord Deverell would have bled to death in his stupor if no one had intervened. As it was, he would be all right.

  “Or if he isn’t, it’ll be the brandy that kills him and not the knife wound,” Miss Benton said crisply. She was as tired as he, surely, but her bright brown eyes showed no hint of fatigue and her black housemaid’s gown was as tidy as her coppery hair. She was the most damnably capable person he’d ever met.

  “Have some more tea,” George replied. “I certainly will.” It was overbrewed and bitter from sitting in the pot this past half hour, but he didn’t mind that. It kept his brain alert. Sort of.

  “I will, thanks. To your health.” She clinked cups with him, then poured each of them another splash of tea. “I resigned my post as a housemaid before I left Deverell Place. Probably I ought to have mentioned that right away. You see, I lost my head when I called for the physician.”

  “Am I missing something? It rather sounds as if you did not lose your head.”

  “Yes, but a housemaid wouldn’t have done what I did. She would have screamed and called for the housekeeper or butler. It was wrong of me to take charge of the situation.” As she spoke, she crumbled a lump of sugar slowly into her cup with her fingertips.

  “You don’t sound the slightest bit sorry.” George set down his teacup, giving up on the bracing power of the brewed leaf. “And Lord Deverell is no doubt grateful that you broke character.”

  “Eventually he might become so. For now, he’s displeased that I entered the study while the door was closed.” She raised her eyes to the ceiling. “It is his private domain, into which no servant is to intrude. If I hadn’t resigned, he’d likely have given me the sack.”

  “Thus punishing a great favor that happened to accompany a small disobedience,” George said. “If it helps, I realize how little sense that makes. But the question is, what shall we do next?”

  She lifted her pale brows. “Am I to be involved still? I have other work to do, my lord. Charles’s work.”

  That brother of hers. No one had come from within Deverell Place to check on him; Lady Deverell’s screaming seemed to have killed the household’s curiosity or humane feelings entirely. George had had the devil of a time getting Charles Benton home and hailing a surgeon to examine him. The false footman had broken one of the long bones in his right leg and wouldn’t be up and about for some time.

  But he was safe in his rented rooms off of Langley Street, a space that George gathered he shared with his sister. The rambling lodging house had seen better days and was far too close to Seven Dials for George’s taste. It was well-kept, though, and despite being awakened in the dead of night, the landlady clucked over Charles like a mother hen.

  Once he’d seen Charles settled, George had been sorely tempted to peek into Miss Benton’s bedchamber. Manfully, he’d resisted the urge, but the rest of the rooms told a familiar enough story. Good pieces of furniture in the parlor and in Charles’s chamber, but all long out of fashion and showing their wear. The Bentons had once had money; now they didn’t.

  The Godwins—the family name of the Duke of Ardmore—were much the same, thanks to the duke’s fondness for gambling. But a duke could always get more credit, and thus he could live in a fashionable house in Cavendish Square and keep a houseful of servants and have a drawing room that looked like the inside of a cloud, if a cloud were also draped in silk and cluttered with elegant furniture and hung all over with those damned oil paintings the duke kept collecting.

  George would prefer to have his own household. He had, once. But this arrangement was a compromise, and one that served him well enough. He had room enough in Ardmore House for his experiments, and he came and went as he pleased.

  “I grant that your brother’s indisposition will dump more responsibilities on your head,” George said. “But I have paid for your time until the end of the week. And surely the events of last night—this morning . . . ?”

  “I know the time period to which you refer,” Miss Benton said drily.

  “Yes, right. Well. When a man is stabbed in his own home, and a mysterious note left behind, surely that proves there’s something suspicious about this tontine.”

  Miss Benton had extracted the note pinned by the stiletto that slashed Deverell’s leg. It was written in block letters on fine-quality paper: FOUR LEFT. The suspected plot to eliminate members of the tontine was now made explicit.

  At least, that was George’s interpretation. According to Miss Benton, Deverell had dismissed its significance. He’d argued that it could mean he had four limbs left, or four remaining glasses of brandy in his favorite decanter, or—

  “Four pints of blood left in your body,” Miss Benton had suggested, but this was regarded as unhelpful by both Lord Deverell and the physician.

  George was grateful that Miss Benton had accepted his own theory. “I see dreadful things all the time,” she said now. “Lord Deverell was not stabbed by a well-wisher, but by someone who longs for his end. Yet why would that person let members of the tontine know they are targeted?”

  George had to think about that. “Suspicion. Fear. The onetime partners will all become ready to turn upon each other. Already my father has started carrying a pistol.”

  Miss Benton patted her reticule. “Wise man. I do the same. Yes, those are good reasons indeed. Though they will be wary, they will also all be suspicious and exhausted. And likely to shoot themselves accidentally upon seeing a mouse, thus saving the killer the trouble of going after each.”

  “You’re not wrong.” George sighed. “But I wish you were. There is no one so stubborn as noblemen of advancing years.”

  “You’re not wrong either,” she replied. “Deverell doesn’t want to involve Bow Street. He wants to keep the whole matter private, from the stabbing to his wife’s mysterious nighttime visitor.”

  “Which is why I need you to stay involved in this matter.”

  Miss Benton shook her head. “Although I failed to keep your godfather safe? I cannot shrug that off and keep my pay as if I’ve done excellent work.”

  “I don’t blame you for what happened. Surely Lord Deverell doesn’t blame you either. Nor do his wife or the physician.”

  “That doesn’t matter to me so much as whether I blame myself. Someone got past my watch, and a man almost died. I’d best be back to Bow Street, where one sees one’s foe coming.”

  She looked as if she were ready to rise—and on impulse, George held out a staying hand. It landed rather long of its mark. Where he intended only to gesture wait, don’t go, he instead batted one of her knees.

  It had the intended effect; she sank back into her seat. True, she also looked at him reproachfully, and she drew her knees in farther.

  “Sorry about that,” George excused. “I flail sometimes when I’m h
aving a brilliant realization.”

  “And this was one of those moments?”

  “Of course.” He schooled his hands into calm, then organized his thoughts. “Here are the most important facts to me. First, you followed your instincts and checked on Lord Deverell’s welfare. Second, you called for help at once and saved his life.”

  She looked as if she were about to speak, and he held up a hand again—less wildly this time. “Third, and most importantly to me, your failure bothers you. It bothers you that you didn’t protect him completely, and it bothers you that someone hurt him. Those things bother me, too.”

  He watched her carefully as he concluded. “You care, Miss Benton, just as I do. Lord Deverell isn’t merely a job to me. He’s the man who gave me my first rattle as a baby and who taught me to shoot with a bow and arrow when I was far too young to be trusted with sharp objects.”

  “How old were you?” she asked. It was a stall, clearly. Her brows were drawn together and her head tilted, as though her thoughts were shifting to such a degree that they upset her balance.

  “Too young. But I’m a wonderful shot now, so it was all worthwhile. Never mind that, though. Do you see what I mean, Miss Benton? I could hire another investigator, but I couldn’t pay someone to care about Lord Deverell as I do. You care, and that makes you the right person to stay on this case.”

  In the ensuing silence, she took up another lump of sugar with the tongs, then held it up to the light coming through the tall east-facing windows. It sparkled like white sand; sunlight winked off the silver of the tongs. By contrast, Miss Benton was all sunrise colors of gold and copper and peach, with her black gown a sharp shadow. It would be a lovely image to view through his camera obscura, though if he ever fixed it upon paper, all the color would be lost.

  But he was getting distracted, maybe staring a bit. When Miss Benton returned the sugar and tongs to the china bowl on the tea tray, the expensive clink of silver on Adams dishware snapped him from his reverie.