Lord of Secrets_A Historical Regency Romance Novel

by Erica Ridley

Right before she tossed Nora out on her ear.

  For the tenth time that day, she wished she could give up the caricatures. But even if her family weren’t in desperate need of the money, Nora was in too deep. The damage had already been done. Stopping now would not make the resulting scandal any less devastating.

  But there would be no scandal.

  She was very careful, both in covering her own tracks and in ensuring she only drew what Society already knew to be true.

  More importantly, in a less than a sennight, it would all be over. Lady Roundtree’s fractured limb was improving with every passing day. Once Nora returned home, everyone’s lives would go right back to normal. Both she and the caricatures would be quickly forgotten.

  A footman appeared in the open doorway. “Mr. Grenville is here for tea, madam.”

  A rush of excitement filled Nora at the sound of Mr. Grenville’s name.

  “Shall I have the repast brought to this room instead?” the footman asked.

  “No, no. It’s already set up the way I like it.” Lady Roundtree motioned her footman toward the handles of her chair. “Take me to my favorite settee.”

  She and Lady Roundtree had only been installed in the parlor for a few moments when Mr. Grenville strode into the room.

  Nora leapt up to curtsey. Instead, she froze in fear.

  She had expected him to take her breath away, but not with a display of anger.

  This was not the playful man who had helped her train a puppy with teacakes. Nor was this the rakish gentleman who had set her heart aflutter with a decadent waltz and a stolen kiss.

  This version of Mr. Grenville was darker. Harder. More dangerous.

  “What happened?” Nora stammered in alarm. Had he somehow found out the truth?

  His beautiful lips curled into a sneer. “Have you seen the latest filth?”

  She frowned. “What fil—”

  “The caricaturist dares to draw my sister,” he snarled.

  Nora’s stomach bottomed.

  Mr. Grenville gripped the back of a chair but did not bring himself to sit down upon it. “I will not rest until he is destroyed.”

  “B-but the drawing didn’t say anything bad about your sister,” Nora blurted. “Or her husband. It’s Society who finds fault with perfectly normal marital—”

  She clamped her teeth together before any more confessions could tumble out.

  Lady Roundtree winced. “I thought I burned that one before you had a chance to see it.”

  Nora cleared her throat. “Er…”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Mr. Grenville threw himself into the rosewood chair with obvious agitation. “All of England has seen it by now. Camellia’s likeness is being used not only for mockery, but to line some cretin’s pocket.”

  Nora’s throat clogged with shock and guilt. She had thought she was doing a good thing. Poking fun where it belonged, not at the innocent. She had meant no insult to Lady Wainwright.

  Belatedly, she realized even a “positive” caricature was worse than no caricature at all for a man as fiercely protective of his family as Mr. Grenville.

  Drat her pen. Nora knew exactly what it felt like to do anything within one’s power to protect one’s family. It was good fortune she would soon be gone. She had no doubt a man this angry would turn over every stone in London in search of the culprit.

  “That’s… terrible,” she managed faintly. “I can only imagine how you and your sister must feel.”

  He threw his hands in the air in frustration. “Everyone can scrounge up some semblance of sympathy except for the black-hearted rotter behind these cruel cartoons.”

  Lady Roundtree’s fingers fluttered in perturbation. “Do you want a teacake?”

  “No,” he answered flatly. “I want justice.”

  Nora gulped.

  Captain Pugboat leaped onto her lap. Reflexively, she stroked his soft, wrinkled fur until even that made her feel like a monster. The man who had so quickly begun to fill her mind and her heart was suffering because of an action she had taken, and her only response was to stroke the puppy in her lap like a madman?

  Mr. Grenville stared up at the ceiling. “Who could have done such a thing?”

  Nora pushed Captain Pugboat onto the floor. She didn’t deserve him.

  She didn’t deserve any of them.

  Lady Roundtree and Mr. Grenville were in the presence of a fraud.

  This was her chance to come clean to them both… Yet she couldn’t do it, no matter how much she might wish she could. The consequences would be too disastrous.

  If Mr. Grenville discovered the truth, the very best she could hope for was him giving her the cut direct and never speaking to her again.

  However, the most likely scenario was losing him, her cousin, her post, and the secret income all at once. Without the funds from the cartoons, she would not be able to rescue her family from poverty by helping to make their small farm self-sustaining again.

  But she was done with caricatures of real people.

  They weren’t worth the price on her soul.

  She had meant the drawings as a means of helping her family, not hurting Mr. Grenville’s loved ones.

  The reduced income might mean Carter’s plans to make the sheep farm self-sustainable this year wouldn’t happen after all. But she couldn’t risk an innocent being hurt again.

  Lady Roundtree set down her teacup. “Has the caricature caused her harm?”

  “Worse than harm.” Mr. Grenville’s eyes were blank and haunted. “She’s now a laughingstock.”

  Nausea filled Nora’s stomach.

  This was hell. She had never meant to hurt anyone. Not Mr. Grenville, not his sister, not even the Lord of Pleasure.

  She was just the feather-witted country hick they all thought she was, trying her best to make the most of a temporary situation before being sent back home to slave to the bone beside her brother as they watched their grandparents wither and die.

  There was no way for everyone to win.

  “It’s my fault,” Mr. Grenville said brokenly. “It’s my job to protect my sister.”

  Nora’s gut twisted. It was not his fault. He was a wonderful brother. A wonderful person. Heat pricked her eyes at how much he was hurting. How much she had hurt him and his family.

  She ached to comfort him, but she was powerless to ease his pain.

  Worse, she couldn’t even apologize for the damage she had accidentally caused.

  Chapter 21

  It had taken a fair amount of blunt to wrangle the name of the caricaturist’s third-party agency from the owner of the printing house, but Heath was finally in the office of a man who knew the scoundrel’s name.

  It hadn’t been easy. When Heath had finally met with the publisher, the man had no idea from whence the drawings came. All transactions passed through a confidential intermediary. The printing house had no reason to break their word.

  To the publisher, digging deeper wasn’t worth the price of potentially losing their primary attraction. Until the anonymous artist had turned London on its ear, the printing house had been failing financially. Now they were not. Caricatures were lucrative business.

  Heath did not care. Camellia should not be part of it.

  He was going to put a stop to the caricatures right now.

  “How much?” he asked the wiry gentleman behind the boxwood desk. “My client’s pockets are bottomless.”

  While the Roundtrees did indeed possess more money than they were likely to spend in generations, Heath’s fee had already been deposited in the donation account for his sister Dahlia’s school.

  He was not here today as an agent of his client, the baroness, but rather as the elder brother of a sweet and caring soul, whose exaggerated features were being bandied about town in mockery. He was here for Camellia.

  “I told you.” Mr. Ewing gazed back at him in perfect boredom. “My clients expect complete confidentiality, which is what we provide. No sum you mention can cause me to ruin th
e name I’ve built for this agency.”

  Heath ground his jaw.

  In his experience, there was always a sum at which even the most pious gentleman broke. A monetary threshold at which loyalty, propriety, and honor simply fell away in favor of the allure of gold.

  Mr. Ewing, however, was proving remarkably resolute.

  “I shall discover the name with or without your assistance,” Heath informed him coldly. “You might as well confess, and earn a bit of coin for your trouble.”

  Mr. Ewing pushed away from his desk. “I’ve another appointment waiting, so this conversation is finished. I’m sorry you have wasted your time, Mr. Grenville. You are not welcome back.”

  Heath assented and rose to his feet.

  He supposed he could not be surprised at the turn of events. Mr. Ewing was well aware of Heath’s reputation among the ton, and his agency quite correctly had plenty of secrets of its own to keep.

  But Heath was not so easily dissuaded.

  Mr. Ewing was not the perpetrator of the caricatures. They had clearly been drawn by someone present in each moment, and a man such as this would be well out of place in Heath’s circles. Which meant the caricatures had to arrive at the agency before Mr. Ewing could turn around and forward them on to the printing house.

  “Good day, Mr. Ewing.” Heath bowed and retrieved his coat and walking-stick. “I shan’t return.”

  He didn’t need to.

  Heath need only station a quantity of key, unassuming footmen along all the likely routes. The next time a collection of carefully-bound foolscap was delivered to the agency, his men would intercept the name of the sender, if not the entire package, and deliver the intelligence to him at once.

  The method might not be as fast as simply paying for information, but in the end it would prove just as effective.

  He returned home only long enough to dispatch his orders to select footmen well-practiced in being both unobtrusive and resourceful, then once again summoned his carriage. He’d spent the past several days with his sister and the rest of their family. None of them had felt ready to attend any soirées where the latest Lord of Pleasure caricature could be a topic of conversation.

  Now that he’d returned home, however, Heath recalled that the Cloven Hoof had become more than a hub for gossip. Its unrepentant patrons had strung his sister’s likeness about the gambling den as if the infernal sketches were decorations for a royal parade.

  Heath was going to rip them all down.

  As soon as he’d handed off the reins to his carriage, he stalked up the dark path to the Cloven Hoof’s front door. His muscles were still tight from the meeting with Mr. Ewing. Heath had hoped to have done with the caricaturist this very afternoon. He would have to content himself with destroying evidence.

  He pushed past the doorkeeper and into the dimly lit interior. His first goal was to protect his sister. His second was to avenge her honor. One way or another, he would find the artist responsible and make him pay.

  In the meantime, he would rip down every brick of this gambling den if that was what it took to rid the walls of his innocent sister’s countenance.

  But the walls and ceiling were empty, save for a few haphazard strings looping from one empty corner to another.

  “I did it for you,” came a low voice from behind Heath’s shoulder.

  He turned to face Maxwell Gideon, the club’s owner, Heath’s client, and now more than ever—a good friend.

  “Thank you,” he forced from his scratchy throat.

  Max’s black gaze didn’t stray from his. “I have a sister, too.”

  Heath kept the surprise from his face. Although he had known Max for years, the man shrouded himself in mystery. No one had gotten close enough to know much more about him than his name, and whatever details were visible to the naked eye. To think of the dangerous, ruthless owner of an infamous gaming hell as a devoted brother who looked out for his sister…

  “Then you understand,” he said gruffly.

  Max’s dark gaze was inscrutable. “If it helps, I don’t believe the jest was aimed at your sister, but rather at the gossips who find ‘love’ to be a meaningless pursuit.”

  “Perhaps,” Heath said tiredly. Max had not seen his sister’s shocked face at being immortalized against her will. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does not matter,” Max agreed. He gestured to an empty table. “May I invite you to a drink?”

  Heath shook his head to the drink, but sank down at the table. He was suddenly exhausted. Perhaps it would soon be over. Perhaps he and everyone else would finally be able to move on.

  “Can we talk about something other than my sister?” he asked.

  Max leaned back in his chair. “Your mother still hen-picking you to find an heiress?”

  The question had undoubtedly been crafted to spark a reaction. To distract Heath from his current troubles by reminding him of something as mindless as the Marriage Mart, of his mother’s singleminded pursuit of her children’s future weddings, of something as cold and clear and straightforward as duty.

  But Heath didn’t think about duty anymore when he considered the perfect woman. He thought about a young lady who was the opposite of cold or straightforward. The opposite of what his mother wanted, of what the title needed, the opposite of anything he could hope to have.

  Yet whenever he closed his eyes… all he could picture was Miss Winfield.

  “My mother cares about blood, not money,” Heath said with a sigh. “As long as the young lady comes from the right stock, Mother won’t complain.”

  Max’s gaze was shrewd. “But would you?”

  Heath did not respond. His previous thoughts must have already given him away.

  He could not help it. The slightest word made him think of Miss Winfield. A snippet of melody, a work of art, a flash of red. She was part of him now. Everywhere he looked, everywhere he went, he imagined her by his side. And now that they had kissed, Heath feared he had lost far more than his good sense. He was in danger of losing his heart.

  “Ah.” Max lifted his brows. “So there is a girl.”

  “A woman,” Heath corrected. But could she really become a future baroness?

  Before he could consider the notion more deeply, his family must first be willing to accept her.

  Even if Heath was willing to forgo the good regard of the rest of Society, he was not so callous as to risk ruining his unwed sisters’ reputations. They deserved to find happiness just as much as anyone.

  But his siblings weren’t his only family. Mother would not be easy to convince. And if Father emerged from his study long enough to forbid the match…

  Heath bit back a groan.

  Max’s lips twitched. “My advice?”

  “Pray tell.” Heath held out a palm and gestured for him to continue.

  Max rose from the table, but lowered his mouth to Heath’s ear before walking away. “Don’t bollocks it up.”

  A startled laugh escaped Heath’s throat.

  Quite sage advice, indeed. Once he figured out the right path, he would be certain to follow it.

  A shaft of sunlight streamed into the shadowy interior of the club. Heath glanced over in time to see Phineas Mapleton enter the Cloven Hoof.

  Apparently, so did the rest of the patrons.

  Loud neighing came from the Faro tables. Impressive braying came from the whist players. A wild whinny pierced the air from the Loo players in the back.

  Heath sent a passing barmaid a startled expression.

  “Haven’t seen it?” With a laugh, she tossed a piece of foolscap onto his table. “It just came out a few hours ago. They’re stringing them up now.”

  “But, lo!” called a chorus of drunken voices. “’Tis a stallion among pups!”

  Mapleton’s pet phrase? Heath had never believed the insufferable dandy would manage to make it catch on. Something must have happened. He picked up the parchment.

  The latest caricature was a viciously brilliant work of art.<
br />
  A white picket fence divided the comic in two panels. To the left were three beautiful maidens, frolicking in a meadow of flowers with a dozen adorable puppies. One of the young ladies cuddled a puppy to her bosom, another nuzzled her nose against the pup’s face, and the third pressed a kiss between a pair of floppy ears.

  The other half of the panel featured the rear view of a spindly centaur standing in an ankle-high swamp of his own muck. The legs and back were that of a horse, but the florid waistcoat and piqued expression belonged to none other than Phineas Mapleton.

  The caption read: “Stallion among pups… or horse’s arse?”

  No wonder it had become an instant classic.

  “Stop braying!” Mapleton shrieked. “Donkeys are not stallions!”

  All of the neighs and whinnies immediate changed to donkey-like brays.

  As much as Heath despised the caricaturist, he couldn’t bring himself to crumple up the paper. Mapleton had tried to talk him into an extortion scheme to blackmail their friends. Now he would know what it felt like to have his own words and deeds become fodder for mockery.

  The caricaturist still must be stopped, of course. Although the anonymous cartoons never named names, every member of the ton would know exactly who and what the comical contrast referred to.

  Heath pushed to his feet. Before he could reach the door, a red-faced Phineas Mapleton blocked his path.

  Mapleton waved a pound note before Heath’s nose. “Represent me!”

  “I’m not a barrister,” Heath replied in irritation, trying to dodge the bill flapping in his face.

  Mapleton shoved the note inside Heath’s coat pocket. “Now you possess it. It’s done. You represent me.”

  Heath tightened his jaw. This was not what he meant when he had let it be known that any person who could scrounge up so much as a ha’penny was more than worthy enough to be his client. Heath preferred free will on both sides. But this was neither the time nor the place to get into a public argument with the dandy who was currently the talk of the town.

  He cast Mapleton a flat stare. “What is it you expect me to do?”

  “Find him.” Mapleton waved a copy of the cartoon in Heath’s face. “Stop him. I’ll pay you as much as you need. Do you want me to donate a hundred pounds to that stupid charity right now?”